While many small, single-facility companies find Epicor’s ERP offerings to be an appropriate fit for their businesses, Epicor offers extensive capabilities to larger companies seeking to implement across multiple locations or divisions. Epicor’s multi-site module allows customers with multiple geographically-dispersed facilities to configure individual sites to manage the activities in each facility. For customers who consist of multiple independent business units, each with their own financials, Epicor offers the ability to define individual companies for each business unit.
While these capabilities are fine in themselves, it sometimes occurs that Epicor’s multi-site and multi-company capabilities are interpreted as mere matters of licensing and configuration—of purchasing the additional licensing and configuring the additional companies and sites to run the various entities within the business. This sounds simple enough, but focusing exclusively on licensing and configuration can be problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, Epicor provides various opportunities for collaboration between business entities that allow companies the ability to design new processes that cross traditional business boundaries in new ways. To ignore these capabilities would be on par with buying a dune buggy only to park it in the driveway. Secondly, implementing across multiple companies and/or sites introduces many complicating factors to an implementation project, which may be unapparent at the project’s onset. These factors can exponentially complicate implementations, if left unmitigated and need to be incorporated in to the implementation plan.
Epicor’s multi-site module offers many more capabilities that allow large or geographically dispersed companies to streamline their processes across disparate locations. As companies seek to structure their organizations for future success, implementations become opportunities for reengineering. In such cases, implementation projects can become complicated, as business process decisions and project implementation decisions supersede system configuration. Some of the decisions that companies encounter might include the following:
- Does the company intend to go live on Epicor with all companies/sites at the same time or is the preference to implement in a staggered sequence?
- What level of process consistency does the company intend to have between sites or companies?
- As part of the implementation, are there processes that the company intends to centralize across plants or companies?
- Are there internal supplier-customer relationships that you wish to leverage between plants or companies?
Answering these questions is no simple matter—it takes a combination of business acumen, project management experience, and Epicor knowledge. EstesGroup offers implementation methodologies tailored to different approaches—be it a staggered implementation (one site-at-a-time), or a big bang (all sites concurrently). EstesGroup also offers business process management methodologies to cater to various centralized or decentralized management approaches.
EstesGroup also offers a pool of experienced consultants and project managers, well-versed in large corporate implementations across multiple sites and companies. Not only can we help you set up your system to run smoothly—we can help you develop a business process management strategy that leverages best practices and process excellence across multiple locations, while working these decisions into the implementation plan, so you can set up your company for the future on-time and on-budget.
