Powerful Cloud-Based Solutions Enhance Competitiveness, Energize Productivity and Optimize Operations
Stokes Electric has a rich history of innovation and has been serving East Tennessee’s electrical and lighting needs since 1933. Established as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the company played an essential role in building the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex which supported the war efforts in the 1940s. It has also been an essential supplier to the University of Tennessee (UT). Today, the fourth-generation, family-run Stokes Electric business maintains a close relationship with UT, providing practical experience to students through internships.
An Epicor Prophet 21 customer since 2006, Stokes Electric is dedicated to deploying advanced technological solutions to empower the business. Facilitating that effort, the company adopted several Epicor modules, including Epicor Data Analytics (EDA), Epicor Wireless Warehouse, and Epicor Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
“If you want to keep up, you have to keep up,” Don Stokes, CEO & Co-owner at Stokes Electric shared. “Technology changes so rapidly.” The company’s commitment to maintaining a future-focused technology position led them to move to Epicor Prophet 21 deployed in the cloud.
With four locations serving Government, commercial, residential, and industrial customers across East Tennessee, Stokes Electric had outsourced IT to maintain four on-premises servers. “Any special modifications needed to be upgraded across all four servers plus desktops,” Stokes revealed. “In addition, our outside IT resource is planning to retire, which prompted us to look for a smarter solution. The cloud was the answer.”
The migration was seamless. Working with Epicor consulting, Angela Dunaway, Director of IT and Purchasing at Stokes Electric, used Smartsheets to align the entire team around an action list of more than 200 items to be tracked and tested for the move. Stokes recalled, “We left on Friday, came in on Monday and everything worked, down to the printers. It is unbelievable how smooth it was compared to doing in-house updates.”
Epicor Prophet 21 deployed in the cloud has liberated resources from managing an on-premises footprint while help to deliver up-to-the-minute features and speeding the pace of business. Dunaway acknowledged, “Being in the cloud has made Epicor EDI connections smoother, and it helped enable us to also adopt Epicor Lockstep/ Cash Collect, which supports our AR team with customer credit card payments, invoice, and statement requests.”
Additionally, business process rules—such as those for tracking special order costs from sales order to PO to invoice and payment—can be written once and forgotten. Stokes admitted, “Before the cloud, custom rules would be lost each time we had an update. Now, rules are preserved without any extra effort on our part.”
Epicor solutions deployed in the cloud level the playing field for us. Big players pay millions of dollars a year to SAP. Epicor gives us the flexibility and capabilities to accomplish the same objectives at a great value.
A key reason for moving to the cloud was utilizing Epicor Wireless Warehouse to optimize picking and put-away functions. Stokes elaborated, “Managing a warehouse is all about footsteps; we need to minimize the number of steps our staff takes each day.”
Wireless Warehouse helped to enable Stokes Electric to identify the shortest and most efficient picking route as well as for putting products away. “Epicor EDA allows us to see total average pick time by employee, by branch, and for the whole company,” Dunaway described. “We can see if an item is taking too long to pick because of where it’s located, or if a route needs to be adjusted.”
Stokes also noted, “The biggest advantage of Wireless Warehouse is that it incorporated time into the product. Now, we have empirical productivity data, so instead of counting widgets, we count widgets per second. In this way, we were able to trim pick time from 120 seconds to just 43.63 seconds.”
The data also gives management the ability to easily identify the highest demand times and staff accordingly. And because, like most small businesses where everyone wears multiple hats, productivity insights helped to enable people to move more agilely to where they are needed. Dunaway observed, “If someone is done with transfers, they can jump over and help with picking or run a special delivery. Epicor helped to enhance our flexibility and cost-effectiveness.”
The data also help deliver a secondary, more playful benefit: motivating the team to compete against each other for better times.
“Something that I think is not recognized enough is how versatile and accessible Epicor is,” Stokes remarked. “Because it uses Microsoft Windows and a SQL database, it’s an open architecture that is a universal language. We can send information to India or China and it will come back in Windows. Epicor communicates very well with the rest of the world.”
And with Epicor Prophet 21 deployed in the cloud, Stokes Electric gained a more consistent experience across locations, and beyond. “Moving to the cloud gave us steady, reliable speed at every location,” Dunaway disclosed. “And the ability to work remotely is much easier because we don’t need a VPN.”
Being in the cloud has made Epicor EDI connections smoother, and it helped to enable us to also adopt Epicor Cash Collect, which supports our AR team with credit card payments.
Stokes highlighted the Epicor Learning Center curriculum as a particularly valuable service, saying, “A new person can easily get up to speed and if they are using the software, clicking the question mark takes them straight to the tutorial. It’s a huge value.”
He added, “There is so much good functionality in Epicor, but we have to use it to realize the benefits. Epicor Learning is the key to unlocking those advantages.”
A regular reference account for Epicor, the Stokes Electric management team attends the Epicor Insights Conference yearly to discover the latest products and learn how to use them.
Stokes’ pioneering spirit was evident when he said, “Epicor Insights is great for seeing trailblazing solutions and networking.” Dunaway adjoined, “I sign up for lab courses where I can train directly with Epicor developers.”
Stokes summarized, “Epicor solutions deployed in the cloud level the playing field for us. Big players pay millions of dollars a year to competitor solutions. Epicor gives us the flexibility and capabilities to accomplish the same objectives at a great value.”