Epicor Kinetic ERP for Metal Fabrication

One of the initial steps to improving the bottom line is gaining greater visibility into office and plant floor operations. Integrated ERP technology provided by Epicor Kinetic removes redundant processes and improves the accuracy of information, enabling better customer service and centralized operational management. With a completely integrated solution encompassing marketing and sales, production and planning, sourcing, procurement, customer service, and finance, Epicor Kinetic offers flexibility in deployment through its modular design. Manufacturers can purchase and activate modules during appropriate implementation phases, ensuring a smooth and tailored deployment process.

Implementing a customer-centric approach throughout the business and fostering closer customer relationships can result in more profitable jobs. Epicor Kinetic offers embedded customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, facilitating fluid communication throughout the organization. The solution provides a complete workflow for each cost-based estimate, including customer signoff as a stage of the initial design or estimate. This approach ensures efficient communication, accurate estimation, and value-added services to meet changing customer demands.

Manufacturers increasingly apply lean methodologies and demand-pull systems to reduce waste and control costs. With efficient management of the buying process, just-in-time (JIT) techniques for procurement, and better forecasting and demand requirements, businesses can drive down margins with suppliers and achieve cost savings. Epicor Kinetic includes inventory control, material requirements planning (MRP), and purchase suggestions capabilities to provide time-phased material control and reduce carrying inventory. Additionally, the solution offers post-production cost analysis, allowing production management to adjust production planning estimates for quoting and rerun the next time based on profitability and run analysis.

Accurate quoting is crucial for profitability and maintaining strong customer relationships. Epicor for fabricated metals or metal fabrication offers online cost-based estimating that considers labor, burden, materials, outside services, and engineering when building an estimate. This comprehensive approach ensures quote accuracy and confidence, as estimators can reference historical job profitability and past win pricing, resulting in more competitive and reliable quotes.

With modern products becoming more complex due to consumer demands and innovation, Epicor Kinetic offers capabilities to manage complex products efficiently. The solution allows users to retain the bill of material (BOM) and bill of operation (BOO) within a single engineered product, simplifying engineering processes and enabling accurate scheduling and costing of multi-level assemblies. Epicor also provides product configuration with rules-based configurations, allowing non-engineers such as salespeople to estimate complex products based on predefined rules.

Maintaining product and material traceability is crucial in many industries, including defense, medical devices, and metal fabrication. Epicor Kinetic offers a robust solution that tracks materials, finished products, and semi-finished products cradle to grave, ensuring compliance with strict regulatory requirements.