Transcript for:
ERP Shootout: Epicor ERP Review

[Music] thank you for joining us in our clients first ERP shootout in this series of videos we're going to be reviewing various ERP products and doing a compare and contrast as to their capabilities both from a technical and functional standpoint the first product we're going to be covering in this section is at the quarry RP we're going to go over an agenda first which is that we're going to review the vendor of the product and the product itself and a high-level we're then going to review the user interface and technical highlights of the solution we'll look at their reporting and analytics capabilities sales and order fulfillment manufacturing and purchasing and finally finance and financial reporting let's take a look at epic or corporation at a glance epic or has over 20,000 companies running their software worldwide with over 3,800 employees and epicor is located in over 150 countries and does approximately a billion dollars a year in revenue this doesn't make them the largest vendor but it makes them a healthy sized vendor that can handle multinational organizations and unlike many of the other larger vendors Epicor is dedicated to ERP software and not juggling dozens of other software and unrelated businesses in terms of where epic or ERP z' market focus is it generally covers what we call the classic mid market all the way down to smaller mid-market companies up to larger organizations or divisions of multinational corporations it doesn't compete in the classic low end QuickBooks pace or the very high end such as sa P or Oracle multinational terms of the industry focus as a company epic or has products for manufacturing distribution retail and services businesses the epic or ERP application we're going to be reviewing here is focused on manufacturing and distribution as its primary drivers just some examples of some epic our customers across the spectrum you can see that here here is an overview of the Epicor erp modular and functional areas it's quite busy with many many components and really the key of this objective slide is to understand the depth and breadth of the solution the vast majority of the functionality that you see on this chart are all native capabilities built into the software and in most cases are not a third party developed or bolted on solution Epicor has a few of those available but the vast majority of the needs for an enterprise are all handled in one product the big advantage there being less integration issues simpler upgrades common user interface common data model and just an overall more streamlined reliable solution from a technology perspective epicor erp is somewhat unique first of all it's built entirely on what's called a so ax or service-oriented architecture because of that it allows the system to be able to be customized in ways that a customer may need without in any way messing with the source code essentially think of epic or as a pre-built solution made out of Lego blocks such as shown here but these blocks can be rearranged or functions can be inserted in between or work flowed around it in order to adapt to your unique business processes all without source code customization which makes the product easy to upgrade and easy to customize the product because of this architecture can be displayed on a traditional desktop or laptop it can be displayed through the windows application or through a Windows or web browser all using the same common code without different versions of the software for each view in addition it uses the modern soap and rest services api's which means it's very easy to pull data out of Epicor or push data into Epicor all being enforced by standard business logic rules in ways that make it easy to integrate with other systems because of that - were able to present to you advanced features like Enterprise Search composite applications presence and RSS so with that all being said let's get to our demo you let's start by taking a look at the epic or user interface the version we're showing here is version 10.2 which introduces the new active desktop browser type interface for epic or in this example we are logged in as Penny Lane Penny Lane is a customer service representative and she does some key basic things she tracks customer information and she tracks orders so in this example here she has her most commonly used functions shown right here where she can just click on one of them and jump into those functions in addition she has some favorites here she often goes in and looks at customer support cases may manage quotes does some order entry and manages her task list in addition she has her social enterprise view where she can see her various activities in the system that she needs to respond to which is similar to an internal Twitter or LinkedIn used specifically for your epic or data which we'll look at a little bit later and you can see her desktop is relatively simple she also has the opportunity to go to her reasons here which will show her last 20 used activities if she needs to get to the full menus she can by clicking the icon in the upper left corner and here she has access to all the legal entities given to her via security and within the entity to the module she has access to and then within the modules to the sub modules if we were to close penny and look at a different user for example here we're looking at Scott Popeil and Scott is in the sales area you can see he has links to external things like the company's salesforce.com account LinkedIn as well as his favorites and icons now let's take a look at Scott Popeil Scott is a salesperson in the organization and you can see his icons relate to sales related functions such as order entry quote entry quote funnel as well as links to the company's salesforce account LinkedIn and others you'll see he also has his own favorites here related to the things that he does and if he were to go into the full menus he'll have access to the companies that he would normally use were for example unlike penny he has access to the Mexican operations you can see here also he has epic or data discovery views on his desktop such as order history over the last year as well as the total count of orders enter today some simple visualizations that you can embed and we'll look at those a little bit further let's go ahead and close Scott and now we'll take a look at Brian Howard brian is the CFO and you'll see his views are much more financial oriented such as the current AR balance key performance indicator how many dollars worth of ship but not invoiced and the customers overdue information as well as past balances do he also has access to the concur expense accounting system as well as their Salesforce so you can see his view of the operation is customized to his needs and each user can create their desktop the way they want now we'll go ahead and open up the overall Epicor administrator user here which we're going to be using for most of the demo and it has even more capability set up on it in this case they have shortcuts for finance manufacturing and sales and CRM and then within those you have various shortcuts as well again you can see that you have these Epicor data discovery views which are ways of showing charts graphs and statistics that come out of epic course built-in queries this capability is standard with all Epicor systems and you have a lot of flexibility to do a lot of business intelligence right with this without necessarily using more sophisticated options so for example this shows us our customers days overdue and if we were to zoom in to this it opens up epic or data discovery with a lot more capable to customize that view the way we need it to in this view you can see this one is driven off of a particular query and of course you can use your own queries and develop them or use the dozens that are included out-of-the-box here we have various filters such as you can filter by customer group and then if you click on those filters the data will automatically update in real time with those views or you can even swap this so instead of customers across here and dollar values on the left you can click here and now we're looking at dollar values across and customers on the left you can do various highlighting change the formats or layouts and even do matrix views such that are very similar to pivot tables for example there's a lot of flexibility and data discovery to create views that you want and then you can set up an entire webpage for it or embed the smaller versions onto your homepage here as you can see some of these can automatically animate through key information this one shows open order values based on category of sales so now it shows five hundred and sixty-three thousand for automotive six hundred and forty two thousand four commercial exact etcetera as it moves on the Left again you have your favorites and if you go in the favorites you have various functions if you click on the function then you get into that screen where you can perform that function again you have your recents where you can see your most recently used functions which is very common and you also have the ability to get to your full menu system here and again you have various layouts and four minutes to look at that you can look at it as boxes or you can look at it in the more traditional hierarchical view here as well you also have the ability to search the menus by clicking the search icon here you have our Enterprise Search which will show later and our menu search so for example if you were looking for aged receivables you can start typing and as you type it filters the list aged brings up aged payables aged receivables and man aged inventory stock status if I add an R to it now it shows us specifically that one function and it shows us the menu tree to get there if you want to learn where to find it within the menus click on it and of course it will launch that application right from there now let's take a look at an actual data entry screen and we're going to focus in this case on the sales order entry screen but whatever we show you here is going to apply to virtually every screen in the system since Epicor uses a common code base throughout so this is our typical sales order entry screen waiting for us to go ahead and enter an order number we have a number of options in here across the top you have your traditional windows menus including a help menu epic horse help is extremely extensive so if we go to application help we'll get a full amount of help regarding the particular screen we're in and whatever tab we're in on that screen which in this case is our summary screen if I wanted to look at a higher level as to what we're looking at you can always navigate up to that section in addition if you're on a given field and then you say application field help that field information will show as you click on the different fields if we click on this field like P O then you'll see the P O number field if you hit the post button here now as you click on different fields you'll see specific help about those fields and it'll always be available on the left in addition a very important feature here is the technical details option and what this shows us is specifically where in the database this field on this screen exists so if I click order date that's in the order head table with the field name order date the reason why this is important is if you're going to write your own reports or dashboards to be able to know the information on your screen where to get it in the system can save you a ton of time since lite epic or like most other erp systems has many tables and fields and things that don't always aren't always where you think they might be because of all of the different related data so by doing this if you know what you want on the screen it's very easy to figure out what you want in your tables so now if we want to be able to bring up an order we can simply click on the order number here or we can click the search button which says sales order we're going to spend a little time on this because this capability of searching is used to route a pack or wherever there are any lookup fields we can start with a simple search by searching for an order number or Pio number and the like we're starting in a certain location we can also do a search within a search by clicking customer here we can bring up the customer search dialog and now pick one of our customers from the list which returns back into our order search now if we click search we're only getting orders that apply to customer Addyson some additional choice choices here are quick search so if we click quick search you can have user definable ways of searching in this example there's one and this search allows us to search by customer ID by the part number they ordered by the customers part number by their sales territory or what have you again user definable some other options here are business activity query searches advanced searching or even on a tag where you can actually take records that you might be working on or and analyzing and search them in a tag so for example if we go back to our basic search and highlight a couple of records say they rapert represent customers who are overdue we can right-click on them and tag those selected records with anything we want so I can create a tag called collections if it's under my tags only they're only usable by me if I put them under shared any users in the system can search them so by doing that in the future anytime I bring up this search and I type collections it'll only bring up records tagged with the word collections which are the three I had selected before we'll go back and bring up our full search we can maximize this window to see more information and what you're seeing here is an epic or grid which you'll see throughout the system and virtually every screen and every dashboard I'll spend a little time focusing on what you can do in a grid because whatever you can do here you can do in other places if we wanted to go ahead and reorder the grid you can by moving the columns around we can also sort by any column by clicking the up sort for ascending or descending you can shrink the columns you can widen the columns double-click in the system like Excel will widen the column to whatever is necessary in addition you can right click and say show group by which allows you to start grouping columns on common data so if we group by and throw customer ID up here it collapses it to showing one row per customer so customer Berenstain has eight orders and if I hit the plus sign I'll then see the breakdown of those orders you can also do more than one group by so we could group by customer ID and order date so if we were to look at Addison we'd see these are the different dates they had orders and on certain dates they had more than one order so that you would see it here we can group the other way around so now it shows every date we had an order and then within the date which items are in there so if we find a date with let's say more orders that might be in the system like here we can see that there's one order each for Addison and that's all from our grouping we can also do summaries so for example if we had a dollar amount here or in this case we're just going to use the sales order number as an example you can get a total of value of their sales order amounts so keeping this simple we'll just group by customer ID and this shows us that Addison has 481 thousand dollars worth of orders whereas Edwards only has ten thousand any of these can then be copied to excel with the sorting that you see intact here so we'll go ahead and say copy to excel and now once you click on the plus sign in Excel you can see all of the underlying data that was exported if we remove the grouping and now say copy to excel you'll see it'll just come over as it was in the grid fully usable analyzable in addition you can also go ahead and do what's called a grid filter which works exactly like Excel so if we wanted we could say filter it where customer is equal to Barristan or you can do multiple or we'll go ahead and clear that filter and you can do a range so you could say for example custom where the date is less than and you can add more criteria but the date is greater than and now we'll get a list of only the orders in those date ranges so you can see it's very flexible we'll go ahead and close the search now and just open it as an ordinary search and bring in a given record say starting at order 501 6 and we're going to select order 501 6 into the system now that we have an order up on the system let's review the capabilities of the system by studying the user interface what we're going to cover here around the order entry screen applies to virtually every form and screen within epicor so we're gonna take some time here and go over this in some detail first of all it'll have the standard windows look and feel in terms of a file menu edit menu and the like on the Left you'll see a tree view available so here under order 501 6 if we hit the down arrow will see that that order is made up of two lines which you can also see in the summary area on the right the summary area is highlighted which brings in the most important fields from the header the lines the releases and the summary or the totals so for example here you've got your Bill twos and SCHIP 2s your line item details and your totals and all of your data can be entered on this one screen if we click on the lines here you can see here on the Left we have line 1 and line 2 and we can either click the line and hit the lines tab here or one of the lines here and the system will allow us to look at the details so you can see here for a given line there's actually quite a bit of information and features capable but most of this is hidden from your normal summary screen since you don't use this on every single order you can see advanced features like customer Park cross references upsell cross-sell suggested or recommended items you can see substitutable x' crm campaigns where this order came from or which campaign event project related information there's additional tabs of information like commission information for this particular line you can split the Commission up to five ways comments for this line that go on the sales order the pick list the pack lists the invoice and even sales kit details now what's an important differentiator here is if you look at this line this line is a quantity of 35 on order but that's actually made up of multiple releases if we click the release button here we can see there are three releases associated with this if we click the first release you'll see the screen goes into the release Tabb so for that line of 35 that's actually made up of multiple releases here shown in a list of 10 15 and 10 with additional information which you can see in the grid or in the detail view for a given release you can see you can have a different need by date ship by date you could even ship it to a different customer a different ship - from a different site from a different warehouse etc so you have a lot of information that you can customize on a release by release basis including a specific job that the release is related to for production or a project or even a one-time ship - so we'll just go back to our summary screen and look at some of the buttons that we have on here over here we have something called our change log so for example the current need by date is 929 if we were to change this date to let's say 10 - and save this the system will go ahead and automatically update that data but because we told the system we care about this field a change is logged so if we look at our change log entries and the date that we're doing this recording is 831 you can see that it log changes here and if we look at the details the need by date was changed by user epoch or at 117 p.m. from 929 - 10 - so you can specify which fields you care about in the system will track what they were what they became who changed it and when you'll also see a button here for memos here you can put in any types of memos that you might want you can add multiple memos and you can categorize the memos of course like anywhere in epic or you can add unlimited user definable fields for tracking anything else you might want about those memos and you can see them in a detail or list form you could even see them in both at the same time so if we tear the list off and snap it to the bottom for example and you can do this in most screens and Epicor or snap it to the top as you click on the detail or the the list view you can see the details in the bottom we also have the ability to record phone conversations that we have with the customer these have additional fields and they're always linked to the customer they're part of the Epicor CRM system and we'll all be consolidated around the customer and salesperson information you can also have emails logged from the customer into this form as well if you're using the Epicor information worker module we also have attachments capability so you'll see overall this customer has an attachment here which is a special barcode label as an example and within the body of the sales order we have various attachments so for example if we click on this MSDS which is a material safety data sheet we can see those attachments here these attachments can be related to files that are somewhere on your hard drive or on your network they can be files that are automatically copied to the epicor server or they can be files stored in SharePoint or the new epic or dockstar if it's in the epic or dockstar you can open it up in context of dockstar and then within here you're able to see all of the capabilities available in dockstar including if there were any other prior versions and the like you can also access any of Epicor screens through a web browser so for example here we have the epic or main menus available just as you're seeing now and then within there you can launch any given screen so if we were to launch order entry for example now you see the same order entry screen opened in a web browser and we could even put the same order number in and see the same information including the detail lines the headers the release is just like you saw before you can print the forms from anywhere etc just like in standard epic or you can also right-click on a given field and drill down into all of the related information epicor also supports simplification so if you don't need forms with all of these features you can easily customize those forms to show less information for example this sales order entry form shows you the same order but with just limit information that this particular customer only uses which is a bill to and line information which is something akin to what you might see in QuickBooks some of the other powerful capabilities with epic or ERP are its advanced document handling capabilities so for example here we could just print an order acknowledgement out and we'll just do the standard example of it you can see we have different styles one that has the customer logo one that's generic and we'll just go ahead and print that to preview here and you can see here it's a standard form with the company logo and the information on the form however we have more advanced capabilities right from here we could manually go ahead and email this document or we could use our advanced printing and routing which is a capability in the system that allows you to automate the process flows and if you have epic or dockstar allows you to do powerful related attachment and archiving capabilities so for example we say email and capture order here now before we do that let's just note here that these given lines actually have if we were to drill into these parts documents associated with them such as specifications diagrams or drawings so if we go ahead and run this using our email caPSURE option and we'll just go ahead and preview it the system will go ahead and generate these documents which of the sales order and is programmed to automatically pick up the attachments that relate to the sales order and send them to the customer so in this case you can see it's previewed the order however if we close the order here it also goes ahead and takes everything that we've sent to the customer and then attaches it back to the order as a permanent archive and it's gone ahead and attached everything that we sent to the customer including the attachments into the dockstar repository so if we click here and save you and dockstar we'll go ahead and here and see the related documents that we sent to the customer the way we sent them to the customer now if we were to go ahead and go into our inbox in our email and look at that look at this as if we were the recipient of this order acknowledgement you'll see I received an email and in the email is a copy of the order acknowledgement and a copy of the related schematic for the DSS 1000 that's on the order I didn't have to attach that that was related to the part and because it was related to the part it was automatically sent to the customer based on our advanced print routing rules this capability can be used throughout the system whether it's purchase orders parts receivers documents but allows you to be very flexible in terms of automated information flow to customers vendors and other partners and to adhere to any regulatory requirements now let's talk a little bit of finding information as you saw before we could easily go into an order and look up an order by let's say a purchase order number or customer number and that's a traditional way that you would look up information and systems however epicor has a powerful Universal or global search known as Enterprise Search and if we click on that search and click on Enterprise Search here now we can search on to anything in the system any words in any CRN conversation any numbers or words in any documents so if a customer calls up and says they have purchase order 4 2 4 7 1 we can simply go to this universal search here hit enter and the system will find everywhere in the system 4 2 4 7 1 exists which it exists in an order and it exists in an invoice because this invoice was generated from that order once you have that information you're able to then drill down into it so if we right click on this invoice we can go to the invoice tracker which will show us more information about this in this invoice and will show us all of the related information about this invoice so we'll go into our enterprise search here go to our enterprise search function and we'll put in a number such as a Pio number that we got from the customer this could be anything this could also relate to say the customers comments they've made in a CRM conversation in an email it could be a part number any text or data anywhere in the system once we hit the enter button the system will instantly retrieve everywhere in the system where the number in this case four two four seven one shows up in this case it shows up both on a sales order and on an invoice because that invoice was created from that sales order and it copied through the purchase order if you want you can drill further right click on the order and then use all of the standard epic or drill downs like our sales order tracker trackers in epic or allow you to look at information but not change information which means you can give access to a broader group of users and trackers also show you related information so in this example this shows us this given order which is order 501 6 and all of the lines but it also allows us to see if there were any shipments against the order in this case there was one shipment like anywhere in epic or you can right-click on the key field and drill down to the related information so from the sales order tracker we're now going to drill into the shipment tracker which will show us all the shipment details from here we can hit tracking details and if this was an actual legitimate order you'd be able to then see all of the tracking information some additional tabs on the tracker in this case shows us the invoices that were created from that order which we also saw in the Enterprise Search we can even see a summary of all transactions which shows you as you click on the line what releases are on that line and then if you click on any of these releases if they have production jobs what they had and if there's been any shipments against that line you would see the shipment data here so you can see everything about the life of that order in one place all from that Universal search some additional things you can do with this search or search for just a general word like say engineering if we do that we'll see that engineering appears in a number of places throughout the system oops I forgot we had a customer named Barristan engineering and I didn't really want to retrieve anything regarding them you can similar to Google put in a minus sign and say Barristan here and that means find everything with the word engineering but not the word Berenstain and now the list is limited you'll also see a tag cloud here which shows you the types of documents the word was found in the bigger the letters are font the more records were found so we can see we have a lot of job operations with the word engineering a few parts transactions and a handful of order lines and quote lines if I click on parts transactions you can see here where the word engineering was found you can also broaden the search so if I search for showing all sources so we'll go back to our central ring star ring this says find everything where the word ring is located somewhere so spring has the word ring in it bear ring has ring in it tour ring for example so you can see how you can make it broad as well this enterprise search can also be done from any web browser on the web or from certain app for any application so for example if we go back into our Microsoft Outlook here and let's imagine a customer asked for a list of their orders we could simply reply back to them so for example here are your orders and let's say this related to Addison we can just type addison order highlight what we want to search on and then hit a special hotkey and the enterprise search will come back with the results that we're looking for it's shown here in the Google like form and we can also change this into a different view so we can click the grid button here and look at this in a grid or we can click back to that view we also have the ability to go ahead and do an insert on this so if we want we can insert this everything that's found and we don't have to put every field we could just put a handful of fields here and then click insert then the system will go ahead and insert that data right into your email document and you can send over there shipment or order information just like that right from Outlook let's talk about business process management epicor is based on building blocks of code that allow the system to run your enterprise resource application but because those blocks are based on a service-oriented architecture it's very easy to modify the way the product works without modifying in any way the source code of the software this means the ability to upgrade and turn on and off enhancements based on your business needs and requirements is very simple to do with Business Process Management we're able to make Epicor work the way your business needs it to work not the way it may have been designed out of the box in this particular example we are looking at a business process management or BPM workflow designed to handle Commission analysis and regulation on sales orders what we're going to show you here can apply to virtually any forms fields and data in the system for your needs in this case if an order has an excessive discount based on the amount of the order a notification will either get sent to Scott Penney or Brian Howard and then they will get an email and based on their response to that email they can approve or not approve the order for being able to be sent to the customer with the appropriate discount that the salesperson requested so now that you've looked at the actual BPM let's go to an actual order here is an order for a hundred and fifteen dollars with no discount using the logic in this BPM and what we're gonna show you here is not out of the box the way the software works if we put a discount over ten percent but less than 25 percent it's designed to simply highlight the discount field in yellow that indicates that it's something you should look at and be concerned about but not something that needs to get run up the chain for an approval however if we put a really large discount in like 30% a custom message pops up as you can see here which is not a standard Epicor message so I can go ahead and ignore that message and then the system will go ahead and color the field in red if I try and leave that high discount rate and save this order I'll get this discount request box just part of the BPM rules in here I have to put a reason and once I put my reason and submit it the system will automatically notify me that it's been sent for approval and it will automatically put this order on hold awaiting that approval to approve this the manager could either be looking at a dashboard or they can get an alert via email so in this case we'll go ahead and check our email and see a new order is come in that order five five seventy five is above the twenty five percent maximum and approval is needed and since I'm the manager I'm gonna reply to this email and I could do this from a mobile device or Outlook in this case and just say approved but I'm only offering 23 percent and you can actually go to the data field in the email and modify it and click send here now that we've sent it will allow it to process the email and send it back to epicor we'll go ahead and minimize this screen so now we're back in looking at the order and all we have to do is click the refresh button which will show us what the order looks like now not the last time we looked at it and you'll see now that the order has been taken off of hold automatically and the discount rate has been reduced from thirty to twenty three percent so you can see here through our BPM technology you are able to do a great deal of functional workflow and requirements for your business all with a simple drag-and-drop workflow design mechanism that's all native and part of epic or now let's talk about dashboards dashboards is epic ORS way of allowing you to report on information in the system of course we've got varieties of reports that we can look at such as an aged receivables or payables report and those are all generated through Microsoft SSRS or Crystal Reports however using dashboards gives a number of advantages the data on dashboards are all real time much more manipulatable and they're easier to setup and design in addition the report is only accurate as of the last time it was printed where the dashboard is always up to date so as an example we're gonna open up one of the many dashboards that comes with the system which you can use as a template to modify for your own needs if you'd like and this is called our billing bookings and backlog so let's see what we have here in the case of this dashboard it's broken into four separate quadrants and each of these can have sub information so the Billings here is showing us a list of all invoices for a certain date range we can also click on a different tab here and see that same information but shown as a chart showing me my sales by day I can also look at it as sales by customer in the chart or just a filtered list of only things that were invoiced today we can look at another one of these tabs this is our backlog chart which basically is order data then this shows us open orders by customer in a pie chart or the grid related details behind it the bookings chart shows typically what's been booked for the month again in a grid form as well as today's information and our shipment information shows what's been shipped for the time period what's shipped today and on-time ratings so that we've shipped 65% of our orders on time we've shipped 21% late and 25 23% early on any of these grids you can use the standard epic or grid capabilities you saw those earlier where we were able to do group by summarize by pivot tables or copy to excel you can also take any of these Quadra and double-click and snap them out and look at them in a larger size if you need to so we can take this and make it larger if we need to look at more information and because this is just the standard Epicor grid any of these fields can be right click open with and then you can drill down into the information so here we can drill down into the order or we could drill down into the part or we could drill down into the customer etc etc so let's go ahead and close this dashboard and look at another example this is our job cost exceptions dashboard which is actually just a single pane dashboard instead of four but it shows us all of our jobs that are in production and which ones as of now are over budget under budget or on budget in terms of materials labor and subcontractor costs if we click on one of these tabs this filters the list to only the jobs that are over budget in terms of actual material costs vs. estimated here are only the ones that are over in terms of labor time that's been posted to these jobs and here are the ones that are over the estimates for just subcontractors a very useful report for being able to see at a glance how efficient your shop floor is running another example is our quote funnel this shows us all of our sales order quotes which are our opportunities from a CRM perspective and here's the confidence that the salesperson has that we're going to get that quote if we were to click on the line details of that quote you'll see the lines on the bottom update to reflect the contents of that quote if I click on a different quote you'll see the lines reflecting that as well now one of the things you'll notice is this is called publish and subscribe so this segment of the dashboard is publishing and this segment is subscribing and that's how the dashboard can show related information as you look in other zones of the dashboard now in this case the order is a 55% chance of closing we could easily go into the order he'll excuse me the quote here and drill down into it if we wanted to and once in here you'll see the standard fields that are available for the core which we'll go over a little later but here we see the odds of this quote closing are fifty five percent according to the salesperson now I could change that number here if I want it make it forty five percent and then we could go ahead and close this quote and once you do that if we refresh the dashboard you'll see now that this fifty five percent on quote ten twenty two is now refreshed to forty-five percent however this dashboard is called an updatable dashboard any of the fields that are not gray are changeable and of course those changes have to fit within the business logic of the system so for example if I wanted to change this quote to sixty percent and this one to forty five and this the thirty-five once I hit save the system will go back into the source document and change that data so if we were to drill back into this quote you'll see that the sixty percent that I entered on the dashboard has been updated back into the original document which provides for powerful high speed update capabilities in addition that also makes it easy to update data remotely so for example we'll minimize this and we're going to go ahead and open up our epic or mobile access simulator for an iPad this can be on an iPhone Android or any other html5 browser log into our epic or system here and we'll get our home page for what dashboards have been exposed to mobile devices in this case we want to go into our CRM menu and into our quote confidence dashboard which shows us that same data that we saw within the dashboard and here's that order 102 - with a 60 percent chance or confidence if we want to go see the details on this we can and we can actually change the data from our mobile device so let's say we make this 65 percent and we'll go ahead and close that record and save our changes and the system is now updated those changes back in epic or so we'll go ahead and close this go back to our quote funnel and they'll notice this was showing it from the last update if we refresh this this is now 65% so you can see that these dashboards can be used to expose and allow outside mobile users to access and update your data without being a developer there simple so as you can see the power of our dashboard capabilities really allows you to get data out of epicor versus just entering data in epic or also has an additional way to look at your information or data analysis in the system and that's called epic or data analytics epic or data analytics is a hosted solution that talks to your upper core data whether you're using epic or in the cloud or on premises if I scroll over here you can see you can invent embed parts of epic or data right on your menu or you can go into the full interface through any browser so in this example this is an executive dashboard that shows us fiscal year-to-date gross margins this year sales versus last year sales rolling twelve months sales we can scroll down and look at other information all this information is all on one web page showing us quote information percentages over the next three months the past months shipping shipping variations production volumes production efficiency top made parts least leased manufacture components quality month to date scrap percentages scrap by reason rolling months this is all a single dashboard and it's all very easy to customize and create your own some other examples that we have here under dashboards we could look at for example an accounts receivable dashboard and if we click to that the system will now show us the information that relates to our receivables and this is all done instantly so you can see here invoice amount paid them out we can scroll down see our top customers buy invoice amount top customers buy invoice balance invoice balances over the period of time some other dashboard examples might relate to production operations so if we take a look at that we can see our set up hours our actual production hours our labor costs by part actual labor costs by period and we'll just look at one final example of one of these and that would be sales analysis in the sales analysis you see you can put comments on here if you wanted to you can look at our gross margins our sales sales geographically based on hotspots sales in a pivot table which of course can then be selected drilled down on exported to excel gross margins by customer by parts my costs etc so you really can slice and dice your data and all of this data comes pre normalized so that you do not need to understand epic chords internal data structures to be able to set up meaningful data analytics let's look at some of the ways that the master data in the system of Epicor is maintained and related the first screen we're looking at here is the customer tracker screen as we mentioned earlier trackers and epicor are versions of data entry screens that are generally considered read-only so if you give a user access to the customer tracker they can look at all the information about the customer but they can't actually change any of the data one of the advantages of trackers is not only does it have the master data but it also typically has all the related data in the system that relates to that customer master so in this example with the customer tracker you're going to see your typical master information about a customer like their name their address their territory their phone numbers you can see the things like their contacts their ship twos etc however if we want to really drill into what's related to this customer we can get a true 360 degree view so if we go to the financial tab here and then go to the invoices tab we can see all of the open invoices that are on file for this customer if we click closed these are all the closed invoices if we click though all we'd see all invoices and if we click invoice lines we could see the line and item level detail from this customer if you recall from earlier because this is a standard Gribben grid in epic or you can do things like show group by show summaries and even show filters so in this case we could go ahead and group this by item sold so if we group this by the amount of revenue for example we can go to the line amount here and say sum and now when we scroll over we can see for this part o 201 2 2 3 they have $3,400 on the invoice lines or for this part here such as DCD 200ml they have 277 thousand dollars and if you click the button here you can see those details you can even sort on multiple levels so if we wanted to see it on sales by part by date for example we can grab the date column here from invoice date or we could reverse it and say by date what did we sell so for example if we go in this particular line here so we'll find a day where we sold more than one item you can see here on this date four different items were sold and then when they within each item see the detailed invoices we can see the payments paid to this customer credit information we can see their existing credit information in terms of their receivable so if we go to invoices and Ageing you can see their 30 their 60 their 90 we can see any quotes we have for the customer orders open production jobs our maize shipments tasks or the to-do list items that relate to the customer as well as any CRM phone conversations which can we can then summarize into a chronological log of the discussions we've had with the customer you can even here go ahead and record new telephone conversations while looking at the customer here so you can see at a glance you have a great ability to see a lot of information throughout the system for the customer just from one tracker screen looking at the part master file we can get an idea of how information is stored about parts or items in the system and its capabilities at a high level you have a part number a part description and general information such as the group or class it belongs to within the group or class you can set up many of the defaults that you'll see in terms of all of the fields that relate to a part so by entering the part number and the group and class belongs to the majority of the extra fields are filled out we have other fields here and we'll just focus on some highlights such as run out which means continue selling this part until there's no more left then don't allow it to be sold versus reordering whether you need receiving or shipping documentation z' like certifications whether you need to track lot numbers or serial numbers or in epic or we allow you to track lot and serial numbers for the same item which you'll see later if they have a variety of other fields here including our accounting setups as well as attributes such as weight height thickness and other user definable fields and pictures at a site level which is typically where your division or location you can set up information about what warehouses you have at that site you can see this hierarchical e as well here so if we go to sites we have one site and then within the site you have one or more warehouses and then within the warehouse you can have one or more bins defined so here would be the list of warehouses here's the primary bin with it where this is stored this is the cycle count information where the system can automatically calculate an ABC code etc in terms of replenishment and planning this is from a manufacturing perspective how far out you want to plan in terms of blocks if you have lot sizes like you only want to make these in hundred unit chunks as well as typical buffers preparations horizon planning for short horizon or standard that's all available here and then in the warehouse you also have detailed information such as the min the max the reorder points and the reorder quantities so you can see here just at a glance we have an extensive amount of information about the item so that you're able to properly set it up and configure it so the system can automatically replenish it via manufacturing suggestions or if it's a purchased item via purchasing suggestions that are optimized based on lot sizes shipping information availability time and so forth another example of Master File information is our lot traceability so if we pick one of our items here like our poro mod and we look at one particular lot number a lot number one you can see that that lot was received on this packing slip and this packing slip was then used in incoming inspections and then from there you can see all of the transaction history of that lot because every field is drillable if it relates to something else we can go back and look at the receipt entry tracker here to see the details of that given receipt so here you can see everything about that all of the lines that have been received and then all of the details about the receipt of that line just by clicking on that we also have a serial traceability analysis here so for example for this item DSS 1012 these are all the serial numbers we have of that item in the system and if you click on each serialized item for this you can see all of the transactions that have touched this item by looking at it so for example here for serial number 14 you see the details here for serial 101 213 all of the details here and this shows you what transaction it was a purchase to our inventory then it was picked and then it was picked the stock and then it was shipped to the customer and the related information here's the PIO it came in on if it was shipped to the customer you can see the order and then you can see the pack if you wanted to drill down in the order you can say open width sales order tracker and look at the sales order details so here are the sales order details that related to that serial number transaction you could reprint the sales order email it what have you so you can see the information that we have in the system is very detailed and very related and you're able to drill down and drill around to get to any of that information from anywhere that matters about our opportunity and quote order entry screen in epic or CRM sales opportunities and quotes are one in the same that's why you'll see within our quotes information such as the confidence of closing the quote or opportunity marketing sources and activities and so forth as well as sales tasks paths we'll go ahead here and just create a new opportunity quote put in a customer we want a quote we don't have our purchase order number at this time say when we think the quote will be Dubai or when we hope to hear an answer and let's say we have a 50% chance confidence of closing this at this point we can now go ahead and put a new line on this quote the first line we're going to quote is a simple distribution item and we'll go ahead and say it's a washer for expected quantity of 10 and we can accept the default price I hit enter to go to the next new line and in this case I'm going to go ahead and select DSS 700 this is a manufactured item if we go to our lines here we can see the detail of information about an item line in terms of extra fields such as customer part number marketing and sourcing information taxes need buys and so forth however in this case let's say the customer wants a price on manufacturing one of these 10 of these and 100 of these so we'll do let's say for price breaks now we'll go to the manufacturing tab here and from the items grid we will go ahead and get details and we can see that this item only has one revision and it's active so from there we're going to get the method of manufacturing or the steps and the materials it takes to make this item right now it takes a saw a drill a prep and it uses this piece of tube steel we can go ahead and modify this information for just this quote if this is a customized version of this item for example suppose the drilling operation if we look at it according to this we can drill 350 pieces per hour but there's no set-up time let's go ahead and put a half hour setup on the drilling operation and on the sawing operation we'll go ahead and put it to a 15 minute setup time so whether we make one of these or a hundred of these they both require a fixed set-up time we'll go to our engineering tab and then from here we can pick from our descriptions items we might need so for example if I type bolt and say maybe we need a bolt as part of this and we needed it the drilling operation we now drop that and that's related to this operation in terms of scheduling and requirements say we want to add another operation and from here let's say we want to add an inspection operation so I tart start the type inspection pick the operation we want put it where we want in the process or in this case we want it at the end so if we drop it into operations by default it'll go to the end and again we can look at the detail on that particular operation and that operation has some various statistics so in this case let's say it takes 15 minutes to set up the inspection area for this job so we've now taken a standard revision for this item and modified it for just this quote if we go to the worksheet tab we can now see our pricing information so in order to make one of these items based on the setup and run times it's 60 387 per item based on our Commission's we offer we need to charge 8650 to achieve our company mark a preference of 30 percent so if we override this price we can say you know I want a nice round number so I'll say $88 for a quantity of 1 if we go to a quantity of 10 you see the price decreases dramatically because most of the cost is a set-up cost so we need to charge 1032 and in this case I'm going to choose to charge let's say 1099 from a marketing perspective and to make a hundred you see it costs two dollars apiece or 271 with Commission so we'll go ahead and charge 299 for that price and then finally to make 500 it costs a dollar fifty and we'll go ahead and charge that dollar fifty that's fine now let's go ahead and add a new line and this time we're going to create our CFG - beacon item this item is a configured item it's a simple configuration but notice our configure button becomes available after selecting this item now we can see the configurator here we can put a quantity needed the lens color of this flashing light say it's red and noticed that now updates here the voltage require 12 volt and the bulb type filament or LED if we change the voltage to 24 you'll notice that the bulb type locks is LED because there's no 12 volt available 24 volt availability for a filament do we need a mount if so now the mounting becomes enabled and we need a magnetic mount and then the system go-ahead goes ahead and prices it and if there's a second screen of information we can take a look at it such as make sure these are made well and save this and the system goes ahead and configures the materials lead needed to make this and builds a custom configured smart part number based on the choices made if we were to go to our lines for this item and look at the manufacturing details get those details so you can look at them here you will see here retrieved in is the steps and materials to make the item as it was configured the red lens that we chose the magnetic mounting bracket etc all of that was done automatically by going through the configuration we can even create a completely brand new on-the-fly item because Epicor is not only designed for make to stock and make to order manufacturers but people who basically are complete job shops so maybe we want to create a new item called a spring and this item doesn't that it does not exist in our item master we can put a description in we'll call it Addison's spring and now we can go to those same manufacturing details here and put in the materials and this it's needed so for example if we go to engineering and operations perhaps this takes a bending operation and then after a bending operation it requires a laser cutting and then after the laser cutting it goes through an inspection and in terms of what we're working on let's say this is worked on sheet metal so we go into here sheet or stainless steel put it on the materials it's needed at the first step and now we've essentially completely custom configured one of the items on the quote as well we can go ahead and send this quote to the customer once everything is flagged as engineered so we'll go to the Actions menu here say print form and we'll go ahead and print preview the quote so that you can see what would automatically get sent to the customer here's the quote and this could automatically be emailed it can be manually emailed and you notice for the items that have the break pricing you can see those breaks on the quote for the item that's configured it's automatically got descriptions filled in that can appear on the quote based on the configurations and then the total quote price now suppose some time passes and the customer wants to take this quote and says go ahead with it but we only want some of the items we can go here to quote create sales order and then choose the lines that we want to go ahead and turn into an order so let's say we just want to go ahead and manufacture the first two items at whichever quantities the customer chose so we'll accept these defaults here at this point the customer knows when they need this item buy and they also want to know what the we would typically know what the PIO number is at this point so we'll enter that and we'll go ahead and say create and the system will now automatically create a new sales order number five six three five based on the items from this quote so if we go ahead and close this or we could now look at related sales orders and see the details and drill into it from here we can now look at the sales order that was created from this quote so here we can see the two lines on the sales order at this point we could go ahead and process this order if we want or still go ahead and make any changes we might want to make we might also want to use our social enterprise feature here to see what kinds of discussions have been happening regarding this order or we could go ahead and create a new post such as what is the status on this order and anybody that follows me or this customer or this order would then see this in their notification stream and they can see this within the order or if they go into their main menu and they see their stream here they would also be able to see that information here they can look at it on their home page or in their full epic or social stream here so that person could then reply and say it's still awaiting shipment and we could even insert links or attachments and so forth and then record that message that's part of the epic or social enterprise component so we'll go ahead and go back to the order and refresh it and we'll see all of those discussions that have occurred with it are now refreshed and we can go between the order and the discussion or we can tear the discussion off and snap it off to the right of the order if we want it to always be visible as we're working within the order now at this point we could go ahead and print the order and we could just do a traditional print preview or we can look at some of the capabilities or of our advanced print management and dockstar integration so we'll go ahead and generate this and the system will now go ahead and turn this into an email and if these items have any related documentation or specifications or any other documents they will also be sent so we'll just go ahead and close these for a moment and you can see this is what's going to get emailed to the customer we'll go ahead into our inbox and assume that we are now the customer and do a send receive and this is the information the customer gets dear here's your order and then the customer can go ahead and look at their order acknowledgement but this washer has information and specifications associated with it and the ability of dockstar and epicor which is a rock stars and epicor component to automatically pick up those related documents and send it along with the original document is very powerful and very flexible those capabilities can work throughout the system whether it's purchase orders travelers onto the shop floor or what have you now let's look at a high level some of the options for fulfillment picking and shipping what we're looking at here is our fulfillment workbench which allows you to go ahead and fulfill supply for jobs for orders or transfer orders between your plants or locations or sites in our case we want to look at order fulfillment and we'll go ahead and say what if I want to see all orders that can be half fulfilled or more so we'll put 50% in here and then click search and we can fill in a bunch of criteria here or you can use saved criteria if you have commonly used information say search and we'll just go ahead and select everything that was found and pull that into our workbench and then from here we can go through and select the lines that we want to go ahead to pick and pack and ship for a sake of example we'll just go ahead and sort by order number when using this first item or 10:30 - Kay nut we'll go ahead and select it for shipping then we can go to our Actions menu and either directly release it for picking or reserve and release it for picking we'll go ahead and reserve and release it pick a day to assign and then at this point you have the option if you want to print them essentially a picking list so we'll just quickly go ahead and preview that and this is the type of documents or labels that you'll send out to be conventionally picked by paper and you can see it's telling you where to go ahead and get it and then you would hand fill in the information of what you picked another option for doing this is using the epic or mes stations or touchpads down on the shop floor or handheld devices so in this case if we bring up a simulator of our handheld device log into it and look at our material handling queue and go into our material queue we can go ahead and see the items in the queue this is everybody's queue or I can look at my own queue once looking at your queue you can then look through of all the items that require movement around the shop that you've been assigned so in this case we have these quenette's and we can go ahead and process them for movement if we want or we could work on any of the other items like this 1032 FW we just described we'll just go ahead and hit process which normally you would hit the touchscreen if you're using PC IDs which are like container numbers you can enter it here and otherwise you can just hit save and the system will save that record so we'll go ahead and exit out of our handheld now we can also look at our traditional customer shipment entry screen which is after it's been picked what you're going to go ahead and ship so in here we could either go in and say what orders need to be picked or since the person with the win the handheld went ahead and picked the orders we could just go to actions picked orders and see all orders that have been picked by somebody with the handheld or the tablet on the floor and right from there we can go ahead and say create pack and the system will bring over the information from the pick into our packing slip ready for manifesting depending on whether you have the integrated manifesting or using a standalone device whether it's for an LTL or common carrier like UPS or FedEx or what have you at this point now we can go ahead and say actions print packing slip shipping labels or both will say both and we'll just print preview this the screen so you can see the two examples and here is your typical shipping label and if it was done through the manifest system you would see all of the ups and the barcodes and then here's the packing list that's going to go in the box saying that what is in there and what's been picked yet cetera once everything looks accurate you can go ahead and say this packing slip is ready to ship the system will flag everything as shipped at that point and save it and you're ready for your next shipment very simple straightforward process if your business was simpler you could skip the whole handheld in picking function and just use that printed picking sheet we showed earlier go straight into shipment entry and then enter what you ship based off the paperwork now let's move more into the manufacturing and supply chain components of epic or what we're going to talk about now is epic ores MRP processing or material requirements planning what you see here is the MRP processing screen where you set up your MRP runs you can see it has a number of options here which we'll discuss a few of these the first one is whether it's going to be a net change or a regenerative a net change MRP run basically looks at what information has already been calculated and only calculates the information in terms of procurement or manufacturing for the items that have not already been addressed in a prior run regenerative deletes all of the MRP data from prior runs and builds everything from scratch this takes longer but every once in a while may need to be done to clean up any issues that may have occurred with your MRP the cutoff date is how far in advance you want the MRP to process your data and the scheduled start date is typically the current date but you can schedule it into the future now most companies set the MRP up on a schedule where it runs on a regular basis and most often it's usually once per night but you can adjust that as needed however you can also run the MRP manually whenever you need to by running the submit or process button up here some of the other options we have here are for example run finite scheduling which will automatically build the production schedule based on the finite capacity available of machinery equipment and resources in nor constrained materials meaning have the system schedule jobs to be run even if the materials wouldn't be there some other features such as recycling the existing MRP jobs to reuse those numbers or to run multiple MRP processes which depending on the size your organization and your server hardware can give you better performance etc one of the important capabilities here is behind the filter tab in the filter tab if you select nothing in process MRP MRP will be run for every item that you have if you select one or more sites the MRP will only run for that site you can also set MRP to only run on one part class a range of part classes or a range or single part product group one of the newer features that has been added is you can actually run MRP against specific single parts or even a single part if necessary and once you've made your selection criteria if you want to run the MRP you would sink Li click the process button and now MRP begins to run again since this is normally run at night you're not looking at it but if you wanted to monitor the progress which also works for just about any back-end server process an epoch or such as running reports or other process based calculations you can click the epoch or icon in your task tray which brings up your epoch or system monitor that shows you any reports that have been run recently it shows you the tasks that are actively running tasks that have run in the past based on scheduled or manually and tasks that are supposed to occur on a regular basis in this case our multi company direct server process is set to run on various companies and this is what handles the intercompany do to do from purchase orders and sales orders among companies here again you can see the MRP is processing and it typically will refresh automatically or you can manually refresh by clicking the refresh button here so you can see here now the multi company direct process which is programming to happen every few minutes is running as well as the process MRP we scroll over you can see the current activity message from process MRP in this case it's showing you which part number it's up to and you can wait for it to refresh or manually refresh and you'll see it moves along to different components to get an idea of what's going on this is a detail form and you can you can look at the log for that item as well by highlighting that row and hitting log if there are any messages you can see details down here is well and again we can hit refresh and see what it's up to at this point we'll go ahead and close the system monitor and let the MRP process once the MRP is run the data in the system is available to review the planning workbench lets you look at jobs that need to be linked to a existing job or new jobs that need to be created for an item these are suggestions at which point you can then manually create the jobs the planned job status maintenance screen allows you to look at the jobs that were generated by MRP or should I say suggested by the MRP so it's telling us these are all of the jobs that should get created and then sent out and produced in order to fulfill the requirements of your various orders and so forth at any point you can take any of these or all of them and you can go ahead and firm it which means we don't want it to just be theoretical we want to go ahead and firm this order and we can then even release it so after it's firm it gets released and this time you can then firm process and the system will go ahead and process all those orders that are supposed to be firmed once that's finished that job will disappear because of this dashboard is only showing us the jobs that need to be firmed up per the suggestions from the MRP if you want to see the other jobs you can go to the selection screen here and look at various statuses for example if we want to see jobs at a firm and engineered you can hit search here and now you'll see all the lists of jobs that are firm and engineered including the job that we just created if we want to see jobs that are not yet firm we'll get the list here which is very similar to the base list or jobs that are past due and need to be addressed and these are all that are past their due date that haven't yet been scheduled the production planner workbench gets its data from the information generated by the multi level pegging from the MRP in this example here when you open it up it shows you all of the parts that you have to get manufactured in the system and any of the ones that have shortage quantities are highlighted in yellow if you want you can just filter this to just the items that are short so for example if we were to pick these biking gloves he we can see this is needed for this firm job and we're short a quantity of 24 of these if you want to see what is available for the job if there were any you would see it here and here's all the components needed for the job for this part you can see any shortages and all demand for that part if we look at this 304 stainless sheet steel you'll see this part is needed on all of these various jobs which of course as usual with that book or you could drill down and look at the details of those jobs you can see what it's short for the current job in terms of quantities and all requirements for this job if this job needed other components as well as everything where this job where this part is short on other jobs if we were to look at this from a job perspective and pick one of our jobs here then you get a different view this shows you whatever shortages we have for jobs that have full availability which by its nature would be none if we look at our shortage jobs these are all jobs that have at least one material that's short if we highlight the material in this case we can see it's again short the SS 125 if there's anything else needed for the job and available you would see it here if we look through some of the other data we may find some jobs that have more information so if we look at this particular job this is all the materials needed for the job and that's available this is the material that's short for the job and here are all materials required for the job regardless of whether it's short or not short here are shortages where this part is used elsewhere and here are all demands for the part whether they've been pegged as available or short so using this dashboard you could see both from a job perspective and part perspective everywhere your shortage impacts your operations one result of the MRP process is that it looks through all of your various requirements for forecasts orders etc and in those requirements not only our jobs that need to be scheduled as we saw previously but are also materials that may be required at the job level whether it's at the top level assembly or in lower level assemblies the tool we use to manage purchasing an epoch or whether the suggestions here are made from MRP or even made without the MRP module is the purchase order suggestion screen in which epicor will look through all of your components based on their various min/max settings are needed on various production jobs so it applies to both distribution and manufactured parts and then gives you the recommendations and suggestions that it expects you to do in this particular example you can see all the various items that it expects you to purchase and if you scroll over you can see the item the description of the item you can also see the suggested quantity who the primary supplier is and the actual quantity you want to buy you can override the suggested supplier pick anybody you want override the recommended pricing based on the pricing records and then go ahead and proceed and generate the purchase order so in this example we'll go ahead and order this be n 1 3 0 0 1 by clicking on the Buy button we also have the option here to adjust our quantities maybe we want to just go ahead and buy a hundred out of the 500 and the system is automatically updated the pricing based on the vendor maybe we called them and they gave us a better deal you can also click on the create RFQ button if you're using the request for quote capability if not just click on buy and the system will generate purchase orders for all of the items that you go ahead and select to buy then you would go to the Actions menu select generate purchase orders and the system will go ahead and generate all the purchase orders with for the items that have been selected under by now let's take a look at the purchase order created by the suggestions screen we'll go ahead and bring up the latest POS and you'll see the newest pio from Nordstrom is sitting here you'll see that that purchase order approved and all of the quantities and pricing we entered are there now if we go in here and we decide we want to print or send the PIO we'll say print and once again we'll show an example of our advance print routing and our dockstar capabilities so we'll select this format which is programmed to do that and we'll go ahead and we can either print preview it or just send it along and process it so we'll go ahead and send this along for processing and what the system is going to do is generate the purchase order to the customer and it's going to pick up our corporate wide purchasing policies and bring in whatever detailed attachments already relate to this item to send the specifications to the vendor if we go to our inbox here and do a send receive to pull in our latest email you'll see the customer now receives this email telling them the attached purchase order is available and you can see those right here so if you look at it within here we can click on the PIO form and we can go ahead and look at the related attachment or guide for that particular part that was sent along with it as well as our company wide terms and conditions that get sent with all POS based on our settings so to summarize you can see that we were able to go ahead and allow epoch ORS system and MRP to automatically choose what items need to get purchased select and suggest what's needed and then as the buyer I was able to go ahead and confirm those create the purchase orders send the purchase orders to the vendor as well as any related documents that should go with those purchase orders and that's how epic or streamlined your replenishment purchasing and material management functions once you have your job scheduled for production the next area that Epicor helps streamline your environment in is actually capturing what is happening on the jobs in real time we do this through a function called mes or manufacturing execution system the Epicor mes component is designed to run typically on ruggedized kiosks throughout your manufacturing floor here is an example of the out-of-the-box mes menu if we were to login which we typically be barcoding our name badge you can see the various functions that an employee can do now the out-of-the-box mes component can access a large variety of functions this includes looking up information such as all the details about the job about the materials being made reporting non-conforming materials asking requests to move materials reporting quantities complete looking at our electronic work queue instead of using paper travelers entering counts and dozens and dozens of others these are just the production related common functions if we go to the materials tab if you're a material worker typically these are the people moving materials in and out of bins and between equipment and machinery we have your shipping and receiving functionality a service manager and supervisors area where they can get an overview of what's going on on the plant floor as good as this all is this I may actually be too complicated for most factory workers and because of that the mes function is highly customizable if we minimize this here is a version of the mes system that's designed to be extremely simple where the user our production worker can start set up activities start production activities look up information about the job look at his work queue and issue materials so for example here if we were to go to start production activity we are now being asked what job we want to work on in our example it's going to be job two one two four and the operation assembled per print again typically this will be either coming from an electronic work queue or a printed barcode bar-coded traveler where you would scan the information and all of this would fill in automatically at this point you would typically hit okay but you also have the ability to look at more information about this step as well as any attached documents to the job if I go to documents we'll see here we have some work instructions and a machine set up if I go to the work instructions we can see the details of those instructions and you can see these are a very complicated way of making this item measure once cut twice of course this can be any typo or level of detailed documentation the machine setup just shows you that we also have the ability to attach anything that the machine can display including a video which in this case is just the video of how to set up the machine so once you've entered the job in operation you're working on you would now typically log out and allow another person to use this station but in our case let's assume say it was 30 minutes later we would go ahead and end our activity and at this point we would enter the number of units complete we can enter any scrap quantities or any non-conforming quantities and give a reason so if we would just say one was non-conforming we can pick from our reason codes and say it seems to have bubbles in it and this will go into our quality control system for review you can also automatically print tags um typically thermal printers that would look or would be typically printed out and then attach to the materials as it moves along throughout the shop allowing it to be easily identified and tracked you can add any notes that you did during the job and then at that point you can click OK and move on to your next operation it's really as simple as that again you're typically just clocking in and clocking out and or issuing materials to jobs you Financial Management we're now going to get into the financial management areas of the epic or ERP solution we'll start with the accounts receivable module and some key highlights first we'll look at a common financials report called the aged receivables report which is typically used to show your outstanding invoices from your customers or to your customers what the remaining open balances are and how old they are you have a variety of options such as aging it from the due date or from the invoice date you can age as of today or any date in the past so that you can for example supply your bank with your accounts receivable aging as of a point in time in the past system will automatically remove applied cash and new invoices that are generated to give you an accurate view you can do a variety of filters here such as buy a general ledger count code or buy a range or a selection of customers and you can decide if this is going to be a summarized report just showing the amount owed by customer or show all the individual invoice detail so we'll just go ahead and display to the screen the standard stock report and like any Epicor report it can be customized in SSRS or sequel server reporting services or Crystal Reports and here's your example of your report showing you your invoice date your due date and my sample data here happens to be fairly old so most of the invoices are overdue but you get the feel for the report and then at the end it shows your totals and how old they are now we'll go ahead and do a customer cash receipt the first screen that you typically see in cash receipts is the group screen where you can Akande existing group number or enter a new one so we'll go ahead and put in a group number here the system will say it doesn't exist and we'll say it's new then we'll pick the bank account this money goes into and the payment method where you can see the default is check but it could be coming from EFT ACH a lockbox or other methods one thing to keep in mind is a group is a way for Epicor to allow an employee to do a batch of work such as a series of check receipts while another employee also a series of check receipts and when this employee posts this information it's not affecting or posting the other employees information so it allows you to segregate those into batches once you select that will tell it to go ahead and do a new invoice payment which means we got to check against invoices and you're now looking at the cheque you enter the cheque number you put in the amount of the check and then typically the most common choice here is now to enter the customer ID by entering the customer ID if you go over to the invoice selection you'll now see all of the open invoices for this customer you could click automatic selection and the system will try and apply all of the oldest invoices first until it uses up all the amount to apply or you can put in the quick search of the invoice number you see on the check stub from your vendor and once you hit tab the system will find that invoice and check it off and apply it in this case the invoice was twelve hundred suppose the check paid three invoices so we'll go ahead and check these three and when all three add up you should have a none applied amount of zero if everything looks good you can now say apply and the system will now apply these invoices in full there are some additional options here such as miscellaneous fees or perhaps on that check you saw a bank fee as well as a debit note a debit note is common where if a customer takes a discount sometimes known as an off invoice allowance for something without having to exit the the screen and create a separate debit memo you can do it all within the cash receipts process and reason and have it all total out to the amount of the customer's check if everything looks good you would typically then go ahead and print a group edit list this list allows you to take a look at the data entered and in some cases you would typically have a third party person approve or review the information either way it's a chance to check your work before posting it once it's posted you then have to do reversals rather than simple edits so it shows you in this case we got one check that check-in was in this amount apply to these invoices and from a general ledger perspective it's going to debit cash and credit accounts receivable that looks good then you would typically go ahead and say post process the post and all of the information will then get updated permanently in the system take a look at some of the key Accounts Payable functions first thing we'll look at is something called the AP invoice workbench this allows you to look at your various vendors and then once you select the vendor you can see they're open or available invoices for example this supplier Depot has these following invoices open not only is this a view but you can also see any invoices that they currently have on hold or invoices that we're on hold and with then approved this is invoices by vendor this is just invoices in general that are held or on hold across vendors or all invoices in addition when you're in this view you can actually put invoices on hold so if we're in the vendor depot and we're looking at their invoices you can simply check on hold invoice and that invoice will be put on hold in addition up here you can actually put the entire vendor on hold and this will hold all payments going to that vendor until they're taken off of whole payments versus just on an invoice by invoice basis so it's a way of basically managing all of your payables from one central workbench another view here is our expenditures by supplier which basically is using our dashboard technology when you first open it up it shows all of your suppliers in a graph with their total amounts as well as the data here in detail showing you grouped and summarized by their average amount and their total amount owed if you hit the plus sign next to them you can see the details making all of that up in terms of the amounts and so forth all summarized by year and by month if you were to use the filter here on the supplier group and pick the miscellaneous suppliers and refresh you'll see now it's a little easier to view all of the vendors that are flagged as miscellaneous and their totals as well as their detailed data and a breakdown in this graph now let's look at a typical transaction ap payments like many other financial transactions it starts with a group screen so we'll go ahead and create a group number and a group is a way for you to put in a batch of in Meishan that a worker is going to work on and then that worker can then review their work and post it and they can do so independently from other employees so multiple people can be paying invoices simultaneously within the same company you'd pick your default bank account and some other information at this point we want to go ahead and do a payment and here you could now do a one-off selection of payment against an invoice or even a miscellaneous payment in case somebody is there for sample waiting for delivery of pizza and wants to get paid or you can go to the actions menus and say select invoices and perhaps we want to select all invoices due before next Friday so that you pick up everything that's going to be due and we can also pick up other filters such as just certain types of suppliers certain ones in certain currencies or what have you but we'll accept this and this will give us a selection list of everything that meets that qualification we can say select all or you can just pick individual invoices here if you wanted so we can see the full amounts as you check off the invoices you'll see the system will total the amount you're expecting to pay so as you go through it you can see what your current amount to pay is and what's available so you can understand what the impact of moving forward would be on your cash flow once we select that it'll bring those invoices in and then you can move on to the next screen typically what you would now do is go ahead and print an edit list which allows you to check what your cheques are going to be doing before you actually print them so we'll go ahead and preview that and you can see here all of the suppliers set up to get paid and the amounts that are getting paid as well as the debits and credits that would occur and in which fiscal period typically at this point if everything looks good you would then say process payments which would go out and print your payment's so if we do that you would then get a view of what your typical cheques would look like which here is the top stub and then here is the check amount typically printed on a pre-printed check form we also have the ability to do checks where we actually print all of the checks on security paper and then once you've printed your checks you would then typically go to the post function and you would say yes and at that point the system would post your data to the various sub Ledger's and the general ledger now let's discuss the general ledger first let's take a look at something called account segment values typically in your general ledger you're gonna have a chart of accounts but then you would segment your chart into different segments to be able to slice and dice your financials for the business in this particular chart of accounts the chart has department a division as well as the ability to reference a customer employee specifically in what's called a dynamic segment dynamic segments don't create physical accounts in your chart that clutter up your master chart of accounts but they allow you to post details to those dynamic segments so that you could for example do a P&L by customer or by employee in this case if we were to look at the department segment and then click on the segment values you'd see we have the following departments if we bring them in but here's the corporate department the sales department the GNA department so when you select segment xx or value 24 the department segment it goes to the GNA department you even have an option to set effectivity date ranges by that segment value as well as for the natural account if we were to pick instead of Department say division you would see we have the following divisions which in this case are based on site locations for the company so if we look at a one for Rockford site you can see here the account will get rock as an abbreviation in the description and again that segment too can have effectivity dates the next thing we're going to take a look at is our general journals the system has regular journals and recurring journals recurring journals work identically to the general journal so we'll just show a general journal in this sample general journal we have multiple journals stored in here the first one is an example of Reverse once we select reversing and hit journal we can see that there's one debit in one credit the key point on the reversing journal here is that reverse is checked and the date is here so on this date this journal entry will automatically reverse you'll also note that the date here does not have to be the first day of a month it could be any date in the middle of the month the next example is our import journal this is allows us to illustrate our ability to bring data in from outside of the system anywhere you have a grid in epic or you're able to paste data in from an external application so in this case in Excel we have a journal entry here if we highlight this journal entry and copy it to the clipboard where we have our grid here we can say paste insert and epic or we'll paste in all of the information as if it was keyed in anywhere you see a data entry grid in epic or you can use that capability to streamline your data entry operations the next thing we're going to show is an allocation if we go into our Actions menu and say allocations template we can pick one of our allocation templates here and then put in an amount so for example if we got a thousand dollar insurance bill and say ok according to the template it spreads that thousand dollars out to these various departments based on various percentages here is an example of a journal that's in another currency so you can see here if we look at the details that the currency is in euro instead of US Dollars and finally an example journal entry where you can see that the journal entry is for multiple companies so you can pick a debit in one company and a credit in another company and the system will automatically do the do two and do from journal entries acquired so that's an example of various journal entry capabilities we have within the system finally we're going to take a look at one of our trackers here in this case we have an account selected account 2000 accounts payable showing fiscal year 2011 by period and for each period you can see the total debits and credits for that period if you highlight a given period and then say transaction detail you'll see all of the detail transactions and postings and you'll see the system in this case has payments and invoices and even specific references to those invoices that can be drilled down into if we were to pick for example our current year in this example we can see here we have payments and invoices here we have an invoice for ABC medals for $25 if we right click and drill into the invoice tracker we can see the original invoice that made up that journal entry in here you can see the header and the detail lines that were in there in this case was a miscellaneous charge more importantly along with this invoice we had gone ahead when we entered it and attached this attachment in our dockstar application with epic our dockstar you have the ability to manage attachments and versions and so forth which we show in other videos in this case you can see the original invoice as well as the sign-off on that invoice even without dockstar you're still able to attach documents but you don't get the full document management power of epic or powerful workflow enabled document management system EPIK or Excel Connect is a tool that plugs into Microsoft Excel that allows Excel to directly talk to epic ors database of course you could always export data to excel or you can even link via ODBC excel to Epicor but it is not at the same real-time level that the excel connect can do excel Connect initially was ideally designed for doing financial statements like piell's and balance sheets recently epicor released excel connects 7 which takes all of the capabilities of excel connect and brings it so that you can work with data from throughout the application in virtually every module and table essentially making it a reporting tool that you may want to end up using instead of SSRS because it's much easier to use and people have familiarity with the use of Excel for a quick example here we've got some pre-built templates so we'll go ahead and take one of them and drag them out onto our palette here by doing so Excel Connect will now run through a series of spreadsheets and build out our demo templates that are directly connected to Epicor so if you look at it the first one is an executive dashboard that shows the company here and the year and then you look through and you see that you've got these various epic or excuse me various Excel visualizations the nice thing here is this is actually all real time data so if we were to pick a different year like 2015 you'll notice the data here updates instantly we can pick a different period or we can even pick a different company code so instead of Epico 6 we make it Epico 3 and the data will update automatically another example here is a trend statement so here we got a simple PL buy trend for period 10 if I were to for example make this period 1 you'll see the numbers will all update if I were to highlight this column using standard Excel shifts select and now pull to the right just like Excel the system will go ahead and pull the various periods out except the numbers under each column reflect the period as initially you only have to learn approximately three new functions in Excel in order to fully build these types of templates here's an example of rolling 12 months financials that shows you your actual information for the last 12 months starting at where you start from so here we started in period December we started in September all of the data would update the rolling 12 months from September as well as a chart here's a rolling forecast that shows you your actual data and your remaining budget data and then the total for the year again you can look at it for different years different points in time from budgets and actuals here's an income statement showing your month to date prior year versus this year invariance as well as year-to-date prior year current year invariance for whatever year you have here if we were to look at a different month for example and say month 5 you'll see the numbers all update in real time looking at a budget versus actual this shows you your budget versus your actual for the company here you could even filter this by a location code for example or a department here's a budget summary showing your month to date your month to date budget and your actual budgets you can look at a quarterly financial that shows us our first quarter months and then the total again you can pick a different quarter this is a cash flow report to show you one of the more complicated types of financials to do and here we're doing a multi-year faz b-52 cash flow and here is the simple balance sheet a consolidated balance sheet because excel connect can consolidate across multiple legal entities and a weekly income statement very simple report but what it's illustrating is the system doesn't have to do financial reporting on a month-to-month basis you can actually do it within a range of days so for month nine day six the numbers will now update based on all of the transactional details so you can do financials for any range of dates and not just monthly buckets if you hit the plus sign here you can see it for multiple weeks across so this gives you an idea of what Excel Kinect can do you build your templates and the system then drives the data from the underlying Epicor data making complex financial statements a breeze and the ability to use complex reporting across Epicor we're now going to take a look at Excel connect seven Excel Connect seven is the latest version of the Excel connect series but it dramatically differs from the prior versions the primary differences in the design is that Excel connects seven was built to access most of epicures data not just general ledger so like previous versions of Excel connect it can present sophisticated and flexible financial statements it can also do reporting on virtually all of your key areas of epic or to show a simple way or how Excel connect directly accesses epic or we'll go ahead and just do a simple query on the left you see the epic or ERP and then the major database areas of the system will go in the financial management then into general ledger and then within general ledger we'll pick something simple like informational and within informational we'll go ahead and just bring the chart of accounts in and drag it here once we do that the query window opens and the only required information here is which company we want the chart from we'll go ahead and pick this company here and say ok and now it'll default to putting that data where the cursor is in Excel we'll go ahead and click OK and you'll see it'll directly pull the current chart of accounts out from Excel from that company into your spreadsheet now let's go over and look at some of the pre-existing examples here that shows some of the more sophisticated capabilities this here is a dashboard that shows us a variety of information including profitability from the general ledger sales by salesperson from the sales and receivables module top customers for example month to date and what their values are and we can go ahead and use any Excel tools here to make this larger if we want to scroll down we can see sales performance throughout the months and over to the right we can see more information in terms of top customers once we're in here because this is Excel connect this is a live link tour data this is showing us fiscal year 2015 for period 6 if we were to change this to period you'll see the data here now instantly updates to show us the information relating to period 7 if we change this to 2016 all of the data would update again because it's directly linked to the underlying data if we go to another example here we have a trend statement for our income statement starting at month 7 since this is Excel you can see it'll grow it to those months and years giving us the data that's in Excel for fiscal year 2015 over here we have a statement by division so we'll go ahead and say all divisions and it's showing us for 2015 our P&L for the company if we were to just pick for example the service division now we only see the revenue that relates to the service division in its various categories here's a rolling income statement that always shows you your past information summarized by revenue and costs and if you hit the plus sign here you can get in then get the details of the accounts within it here's an income statement which is an actual versus budget here's the actual and the budget if we pick a different month here say April now it shows us the actual January through May and then the budget for the remaining years so it's a sliding budget here's an income statement showing month to date and year to date again all live referenceable to current data and here is an AR aging report pulling from our aging data aged as of the date shown here if we wanted to age as a different date for example December 1st select this and you can see now by customer their aging and their trend the aging over the prior months and if we scroll over you can see upcoming due invoices and trends as well here's a customer analysis report showing you by customer the amount invoice the average amount and quantities and gross margins for whatever is selected here and we can pick different territories and what-have-you so if we say corporate you can see we have limited sales on a corporate if we say northeast here's the northeast data here's a sales analysis by salesperson by month for the year selected here and then a related graph shown below it consolidated income statement showing you like the original Excel connect Excel connect can talk to multiple companies and consolidate across companies without the need for the epic or multi-site module here's some variance analysis a cash flow a balance sheet so as you can see here Excel Connect is now a very powerful reporting tool that allows you to automatically generate the information that you need directly from Excel pulling out of epic or another key capability of Excel Connect is called a epic or Excel broadcast if we go over to our first sheet where we have our broadcast information set up in here we have the system performing three functions it writes an HTML file to the desktop for an income statement trend view it will send a PDF out to Scott for our dashboard of our overall company and of an actual versus budget dashboard and here it'll send the spread sheet income statement out the Scott if you wanted to here you could filter this so that Scott only gets his division or service area we'll go ahead and hit run and now Excel Connect is going ahead and processing all of those various commands in the broadcast list and either writing out the files or emailing them and doing the various options that you have available so as we wait for it to finish it's now completed the entire process took 36 seconds this normally happens on a scheduler behind the scenes we've just run it manually and again here is where you can set up who's going to receive it and here's the format you want to receive it you can see it offers a number of options including XPS PDF Excel spreadsheets CSVs for exports and what have you now if we were to go to our desktop here you can see we have files on our desktop here called values only for example and we can go into here and see what the HTML looks like and it's gone ahead and generated that same spreadsheet into a website page that anybody can view if we look at our inbox on our mail and ask it to pull the latest email down we can see we've received two emails the first as we asked it to do was to send an overview of finance here and we'll just make this a little larger so we can see and you can see that same information but instead of being changeable in terms of period in year it's a fixed view that's sent to that person for their dashboard and here is the income statement showing actual versus budget as well that we told it to send automatically and then in the other email just showing a different example this was an example where we sent a spreadsheet of the results to that person showing their particular division that we're interested in you'll notice they can't pick other areas so we were able to push out the data for the relevant division so that in a nutshell is Excel connect and it really allows you to create most of your own reporting yourselves without the need to learn advanced developer tools like sequel server reporting services and the like thank you for your time [Music]