Made-for-Manufacturing ERP: A Crucial Keystone of a Digital Transformation Strategy
The value of China’s electronics industry reached nearly $350 billion in 2020, accounting for a quarter of the worldwide assembly value. To take advantage of the opportunity and keep pace with a rapidly evolving landscape, manufacturing companies look to ERP systems. The right software can help businesses stay lean and competitive, while also creating digital factories that help organizations automate and streamline processes, make better-informed decisions, anticipate shifts, and manage costs.
That’s why making the right ERP choice is so important. For OnOff Electric Company, Epicor Kinetic was the only solution.
Tiefeng Guo, IT director at OnOff Electric Company shared, “Epicor Kinetic is a cornerstone of our digital transformation strategy. Since implementing Epicor Kinetic, we have increased business efficiency and productivity.”
With a strategic plan to become a standardized and international NEEQ-quality enterprise, OnOff Electric Company delivers electrical solutions to customers in the new energy, telecommunications, data center, and non-standard automation arenas. To do so, the company’s approach is to transition from a manufacturing-oriented company to a technology-focused one, integrating R&D and world-class manufacturing with outstanding sales and service. The multi-award winning OnOff Electric holds more than 50 technology patents and collaborates with leading higher education institutions to co-develop scientific and technological advancements.
Guo explained, “OnOff Electric practices intelligent manufacturing and effectively combines equipment automation, information integration, management logic integration, and lean production with a focus on sustainable manufacturing and intelligent energy efficiency management.”
Deploying Epicor Kinetic across all four OnOff Electric facilities has helped the company to advance these goals.
“This was not our first experience with ERP,” said Guo. We had deployed other solutions and evaluated several options, including SAP and Oracle, but they were less refined in terms of matching our business. We have many product lines, making management more complex. We needed a solution that would enable us to calculate the cost of each product as well as administer and enhance our processes.” He continued, “We took nearly a year to evaluate options, and it became clear that Epicor Kinetic was the best fit. It is easier to deploy and has the flexibility to meet our needs because it permits a fully integrated solution, from sales order to production, and scheduling through manufacturing. Epicor Kinetic has the capacity to effectively support our business for the next five to ten years.”
Prior to Epicor Kinetic, at least half of our costs were calculated manually. A primary goal was financial integration to enable us to identify costs in real-time and to automate the process. Secondly, we needed to dramatically improve visibility to our manufacturing process. Epicor delivered a transparent view and an unprecedented level of data.
Implementation was fast, a mere five months. That was an intentional pace: Guo remarked, “We recognised that the longer the rollout takes, the less enthusiastic employees will be about it, jeopardizing success. The Epicor team worked with us to secure a very fast migration and then collaborated with us to fine-tune the processes over the next two months.”
“Epicor offered a great deal of support during the entire implementation phase, both on-site and online. It helped us develop and customize the solution to match our business needs, troubleshoot and optimize the system,” Guo elaborated.
Additionally, Epicor Kinetic has enabled OnOff Electric to bring a new factory online quickly. Guo explained, “We’ll be ready when the new factory begins trial production because we can copy the application as a whole, apply it, and have it up and running within 20 days.”
With Epicor Kinetic deployed, OnOff Electric is finally achieving the value they require.
Guo highlighted, “Prior to Epicor Kinetic, at least half of our costs were calculated manually. A primary goal was financial integration to enable us to identify costs in real-time and to automate the process. Secondly, we needed to dramatically improve visibility to our manufacturing process. I liken the factory floor to a black box; we had almost zero ability to see what was happening. Epicor delivered a transparent view and an unprecedented level of data. Finally, we were able to integrate all of our management logic systems and interdependencies into Epicor Kinetic, giving us a complete view of our business.”
As an example, Guo pointed to transforming tasks such as creating business receipts. He cited, “Epicor Kinetic has enabled warehouse employees to directly adjust inventory by scanning bar codes; eliminating the need for an accounting clerk to create additional paperwork, resulting in a faster and more streamlined methodology. This gives us the flexibility to eliminate some roles and invest in others, maximizing our resources.”
The result is that the business has gained detailed production and employee productivity data. Guo acknowledged, “By analyzing Epicor data, we now have a much better understanding of what’s inside the ‘black box,’ and we can better control and adjust the processes. Those insights also have given us the power to tune materials distribution, which has further enhanced productivity because employees no longer have to look for materials. They have everything they need, right when they need them, for a continuous productivity stream.”
Guo continued, “Finally, because we had inventory data, we were able to create a plan to reduce materials on-hand and then put the pieces in motion to do so. We trimmed raw material inventory from 10% to 7%. While not a huge drop, it’s consistently improving and because we have so many complicated product lines, it is a good metric.”
At the end of the day, Epicor has given us the foundation to achieve a true digital factory.
Mr. Guo summarized, “We constantly compare the year-on-year rate and month-on-month rate for different metrics so we can monitor, for example, the entire output value of our production whenever needed. Epicor has successfully delivered the visibility and efficiencies that we were looking for in a new ERP.