Working in partnership throughout the customer lifecycle

The Covid-19 pan­dem­ic cre­at­ed and exposed exist­ing sup­ply chain prob­lems, mak­ing busi­ness lead­ers realise the need to have access to accu­rate, real-time data. Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion has helped them make rapid deci­sions and track prod­ucts across their entire life­cy­cle to min­imise and avoid dis­rup­tion.

Tran­si­tion­ing to cloud ERP soft­ware is a key part of the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion process. It empow­ers busi­ness­es by max­imis­ing sup­ply chain vis­i­bil­i­ty, giv­ing them access to crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion remote­ly and using machine learn­ing to find out what their sup­ply chain will look like in the future, so they can stress-test its resilience. Find­ing a long-term cloud ERP part­ner can give a busi­ness a com­pet­i­tive edge, but for many com­pa­nies this is prov­ing a dif­fi­cult task.

Epicor’s 2022 ‘Indus­try Insights Report,’ which sur­veyed 1,350 tech­nol­o­gy deci­sion mak­ers across the man­u­fac­tur­ing, build­ing sup­ply, retail, auto­mo­tive and care sec­tors in the US, UK, Aus­tralia and New Zealand, found that 94% of busi­ness­es saw cloud as a strate­gic pri­or­i­ty for the year. But, it also revealed that 45% of deci­sion mak­ers active­ly con­sid­er mov­ing to a new ERP provider every one to three years. A fur­ther 25% look every year and 6% as fre­quent­ly as every month. Why are these tech­nol­o­gy lead­ers dis­sat­is­fied with their part­ners and how can cloud providers raise their game?

Sev­er­al rea­sons were cit­ed for con­sid­er­ing switch­ing providers in the report, includ­ing bet­ter func­tion­al­i­ty from anoth­er provider (30%), inte­gra­tion chal­lenges with new tech­nolo­gies (29%), more com­pet­i­tive pric­ing from anoth­er provider (28%), and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns (27%). Cus­tomers also stat­ed clear­ly what they want from a provider, notably an indus­try and busi­ness spe­cif­ic solu­tion, the abil­i­ty to inte­grate with oth­er busi­ness appli­ca­tions, data sup­port dur­ing migra­tion, trans­paren­cy and ongo­ing sup­port and train­ing mate­ri­als after the soft­ware is live.

Under­stand­ing these needs has been key to Epicor’s suc­cess. The aver­age length of a part­ner­ship between Epi­cor and its part­ners is 13 years, while the company’s most loy­al cus­tomers have been work­ing with them for as long as 25 years. Andy Coussins, SVP and head of inter­na­tion­al at Epi­cor, says a tried and test­ed deliv­ery frame­work across the entire rela­tion­ship is essen­tial. “The work begins before the pur­chase of any soft­ware,” he says. “We learn about our cus­tomers and their indus­tries and it con­tin­ues through­out the rela­tion­ship.”

Time spent on gain­ing a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the nuances of busi­ness­es and their indus­tries, means Epi­cor can pro­vide a cus­tomised solu­tion. “Your provider may already know your indus­try, but they don’t know your busi­ness unique­ly, why you win, why you’re dif­fer­ent and your aspi­ra­tions,” says Coussins. “A gener­ic ERP solu­tion may not be the right fit, we focus on deep indus­try exper­tise in both our peo­ple and solu­tions. We like to say ‘made with you, for you’ because we work so close­ly along­side our cus­tomers.”

Data migra­tion is anoth­er con­cern for busi­ness­es when mov­ing to the cloud. In fact, 59% of par­tic­i­pants in Epicor’s report said they want help with data back­ups dur­ing migra­tion. Equal­ly impor­tant is how they get that sup­port; 58% of the busi­ness­es said that hav­ing a ded­i­cat­ed migra­tion team would increase their com­fort in the jour­ney to the cloud. Sean Sim­mons, pres­i­dent of Epi­cor part­ner Tuffaloy Prod­ucts, says the for­mer pro­vid­ed per­fect sup­port. “Epi­cor assigned two con­sul­tants to work side by side with us, train­ing our per­son­nel, writ­ing cus­tom code, trans­fer­ring the data, val­i­dat­ing and test­ing. The result was a tran­si­tion that went as smooth­ly as I could have pos­si­bly imag­ined.”

Speed is a neces­si­ty for mod­ern busi­ness­es, which can’t afford cost­ly time delays as they update sys­tems and process­es. Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty – the abil­i­ty for a cloud ERP sys­tem to inte­grate seam­less­ly with exist­ing sales, finance or human resource appli­ca­tions – is a neces­si­ty.

In May, Epi­cor rolled out an intel­li­gent soft­ware inte­gra­tion tool, Epi­cor Automa­tion Stu­dio, that fea­tures the pow­er of machine learn­ing and aims to save time, elim­i­nate man­u­al tasks and increase pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. It helps com­pa­nies to eas­i­ly con­nect the dots between busi­ness and oper­a­tional sys­tems, for exam­ple Sales­force, ADP, Ser­vi­ceNow and over 1,000 pop­u­lar appli­ca­tion con­nec­tors, and mod­i­fy and imple­ment the work­flow inte­gra­tions they need.

Train­ing mate­ri­als and the avail­abil­i­ty of experts to help train up staff on cloud sys­tems is also high up on the wish-list of busi­ness­es when assess­ing poten­tial cloud providers. Even after ERP go-live, cus­tomers need ongo­ing sup­port. Epi­cor asked busi­ness deci­sion mak­ers where they look for sup­port, with lead­ers cit­ing a range of sources, from tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion to train­ing and blogs. Some cus­tomers even explore peer knowl­edge from oth­er ERP users and user groups. Epi­cor has embed­ded learn­ing resources into every cloud ERP solu­tion. There are also train­ing tools and sup­port for role-spe­cif­ic tasks curat­ed to indi­vid­ual learn­ing paths to help staff to extend their knowl­edge of the sys­tem.

Ongo­ing train­ing and sup­port is just one exam­ple of the con­tin­u­a­tion of an effec­tive cloud ven­dor part­ner­ship even after the cloud soft­ware is live and busi­ness­es are famil­iar with the soft­ware. In the months and years that fol­low, the rela­tion­ship takes on a dif­fer­ent form. “Busi­ness­es some­times believe that after ‘go live’ the job is done, but the real­i­ty is that this is just anoth­er mile­stone,” says Coussins. “Once live, it’s about con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, reimag­in­ing, learn­ing and adapt­ing.” This is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant if a busi­ness expands. “Some­times our cus­tomers buy oth­er busi­ness­es or expand into new mar­kets, so hav­ing a part­ner you can lean on in these instances is crit­i­cal,” he adds.

Hav­ing the right part­ner­ships in busi­ness is crit­i­cal to long term suc­cess. Com­pa­nies need an ERP part­ner that under­stands their indus­try, that they can trust and rely on, and has the right tools and peo­ple in place to help them to solve their prob­lems. It’s also clear that even in a world of com­plex dig­i­tal sys­tems, it’s still the human con­nec­tion that busi­ness­es seek from long term part­ner­ships and what ulti­mate­ly sus­tains them.

For more, please vis­it epicor.com/IIR

Pro­mot­ed by Epi­cor