Streamlining Business Processes, Reducing Costs and Leveraging Automation
Make-to-order industrial equipment manufacturer leverages automation to gain process efficiencies in all areas, from customer purchase orders to production operations and on through invoicing.
Webster went live on Epicor ERP (now known as Epicor Kinetic) in May 2017. The system has provided the company with key capabilities to streamline its make-to-order manufacturing processes.
Today, more than half of the company’s quotes and orders are generated via 11 different Epicor product configurators. Based upon user input, these configurators helped to enable on-the-fly order configuration by automatically creating bills of materials (BOM), routings, selling prices, and part numbers.
Webster has improved the efficiency of its processes for handling sales orders, invoices, and other transaction documentation. The company recently migrated to Epicor EDI to support electronic document exchange after its existing EDI provider made the sunset of its solution.
Also, Webster just recently implemented the Epicor Maintenance module to automate production and facilities equipment maintenance. Armed with Advanced Material Management, Webster employees on the shop floor use mobile tablet devices to request materials and have complete inventory-level visibility. These are just a few of the benefits the company has experienced working with Epicor, says Sharla Cline, ERP & IT Systems Manager, Webster Industries, Inc., adds that these efficiencies have also helped the company mitigate skilled labor shortages—an issue that nearly all manufacturers face.
As an Epicor Kinetic user, Webster decided to move to Epicor EDI. “Working with Epicor EDI was a great experience from the start,” Cline said. “The system is much more intuitive and easier to work with than our previous EDI solution. The normal pains of implementing a new EDI software were minimized after seeing the HQX change user interface and how easy it was to set up and change the mappings and transaction settings,” she said, referring to the Epicor EDI platform portal.
HQXchange helps to offer a modern user interface that is built to support optimal visibility and ease of operation. A “one-click” trading partner set-up process minimizes trading partner setup time and configuration errors.
The ability to monitor and configure the entire EDI solution from one program is amazing...we no longer have to babysit our EDI software.
An intuitive and flexible EDI data mapper allows for fully automated business-to-business document processes aligned with each business operation, while unparalleled reporting helps offer complete transparency and notifications of EDI errors.
“The ability to monitor and configure the entire EDI solution from one program is amazing,” Cline said. “The software is intuitive, and making changes is straightforward. The automatic monitoring and alerting capabilities allow us to be mostly hands-off, only handling exceptions when they arise. We no longer have to babysit our EDI software.”
Working with a single vendor in Epicor, the EDI implementation and training was completed in about 100 days, creating a fast migration process with a lot of confidence in the EDI solution heading into the go-live.
“The implementation team was very knowledgeable and responsive, and it led to a successful go-live. The team was quite accommodating, tailoring the training to the needs of our users,” Cline said. “This helped us to hit the ground running when we went live, making additional changes with ease. Another huge benefit for us was having a separate non-production environment to support complete end-to-end testing.”
Our experience with Epicor EDI has been great. Additionally, the solution was much more cost-effective than our previous EDI vendor, so that was an added benefit.
“The support staff was friendly and efficiently answered our questions. They even checked in with us after the case was closed to make sure everything was still working as expected and that we did not have any follow-up questions,” she added.
Real-time transmission of inbound and outbound documents has increased process efficiency, enabling Webster to decrease EDI errors by 75%. Now, the team operates via a true management-by-exception approach.
When error instances do arise, they receive an error code in an email with a PDF attached; this allows for easy issue identification as opposed to having to review hundreds of lines of code, as was required previously. “HQXchange provides exceptional visibility for all our transactions, greatly decreasing the time it takes for analysis,” Cline said. “In the past, each exception took approximately five minutes to analyze and address; now, each takes only about 30 seconds.”
On the synergies of Epicor Kinetic and Epicor EDI, Cline said, “it’s great from an end user perspective that everything is integrated. A customer purchase order automatically creates a sales order in the Epicor Kinetic system.”
