What Cloud is Your Cloud Provider On?
ERP Hosting is Better Than a Trip to the Ice Cream Parlor The age of “mass customization” pervades many areas of our business and personal lives. The general populace has grown accustomed to being able to “dial in” solutions as needed, especially when it comes to...
5 Signs Your Business Needs Cybersecurity Training
Cybersecurity Education Begins With Ownership Small and medium sized business owners beware! 65% of attacks that originate in cyberspace are aimed at companies that think they’re too small to be of interest to cybercriminals. If you think you're at low risk, read on...
Paying the Piper in Epicor E10, Kinetic & Prophet 21
Best Practices for Paying Supplier Invoices in Epicor ERP There are many challenges when it comes to paying supplier invoices in Epicor E10, Epicor Kinetic (E11), or in Epicor Prophet 21. In simple terms, a company purchases goods from a supplier according to...
Leveraging Union Queries in Epicor Kinetic BAQs
BAQs — Becoming One Data A fundamental value of your Epicor ERP system is the data that it holds — all that data sits there, nicely organized and begging for consumption. But good data needs to be converted into information to be of value. As such, getting good data...
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month
EstesGroup is a Cybersecurity Awareness Month Champion Are you mitigating both old and new cybersecurity threats? Are you navigating the vulnerabilities at both on-site and remote office locations? Are you communicating current best practices for cybersecurity across...
Scaling Up & Scaling Out in a P21 Ecosystem
P21 System Performance in Accordance When deploying any enterprise-level application such as Epicor’s Prophet 21 ERP, system performance is an extremely important consideration, one that can have significant impact on the successful use of the application. Memory...
Employee Retention: The Attrition Mission
There's a significant shift occurring in the job market. And our manufacturing and distribution industries will not escape the impact. For the past few years, it has been an employer's market and many workers were unable to find jobs. But that has changed in the last...
Preventing Ransomware in the Automotive Aftermarket
How to Secure the Automotive Aftermarket To help develop awareness of cybersecurity needs in the manufacturing and distribution industries, EstesGroup conducted a joint education session with the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA). SEMA is a trade...
ERP Culture & Digital Transformation
Who says you have no culture? Eric Kimberling and the team at Third Stage Consulting serve as thought leaders in the digital transformation community, helping customers through software selection, change management, system implementation, and the integration of...
Manufacturing in America, Made in Colorado
Made by Colorado Manufacturers Like many areas in the US, the Colorado manufacturing scene has been scrambling to adjust to the ongoing movement of the pandemic and its aftershocks. Changes in demand, fluctuations in labor, and radical shifts in supply and...
EstesGroup Partners with RIPEN for Digital Commerce
ESTESGROUP & RIPEN ANNOUNCE DIGITAL COMMERCE PARTNERSHIP EstesGroup has announced a partnership with RIPEN, a leading digital commerce experience agency. The strategic alliance allows the two tech leaders to join forces and offer best-in-class Prophet 21 and...
Prophet 21 E-Commerce Integration Tips
E-Commerce is Drawing Interest from Epicor Prophet 21 Users Trend lines are never a function of simple math. As much as I’d like my world around me to conform to the simple y=mx+b along a clean Cartesian plane, the world around me thinks otherwise. Life, they say, is...
ROI of ERP: Software Money Games & Executive Moves
Once you calculate ROI (return on investment) of ERP software and determine that a new system will result in new profitability, the most important step appears: your software selection decision. But who should make this final and most important decision about the...
Views from Booth 25 – P21WWUG CONNECT 2021
Prophet 21 Trade Show Truths Dining and whining with the end users in the trenches of Prophet 21’s annual conference can elicit frank and poignant sentiments regarding the state of software and the state of the broader markets that it works to support. Listening to...
9 Questions to Answer at P21WWUG CONNECT
P21WWUG CONNECT - BOOTH 25 The 2021 Prophet 21 user conference (P21WWUG CONNECT) is less than a week away. For those of us in attendance, it is an exciting time for collaboration and discovery. User conferences are a great opportunity to trade ideas with other users...
Total Cost or Total Loss: New Software, New Budget
The cost of a software budget Software selection can be a lot like car shopping. You do a few test drives. You talk to happy drivers. You ask for the price and then ask for a better deal. You begin to investigate how much this new vehicle is going to cost. One part of...
When Your Value Stream Begins With Software
Stay in the Flow: Estimate Your Software Value Returns Businesses are supposed to earn a profit. New software can quickly lead to debt. Before you commit to a new software acquisition, know if your new possibilities will also be new expenses. If one of your customers...
Custom Cloud: Public Cloud Choices, SaaS Challenges
What to Do When ERP Turns SaaS I once sat in at a sales conference for an ERP vendor and listened as the CEO explained sales strategy as it related to their ongoing movement to the cloud. He described the situation as one of configurability vs. customizability. There...
Hosted or SaaS ERP? Understanding the Differences
In the world of enterprise resource planning (ERP), companies spend a lot of time on the software selection cycle. Determining which application will best fit the needs of the business also brings deployment model questions to the table. Currently, many manufacturers...
A Business Automation Nation – How AI Helps Us Connect
The 2020 shift to remote work forced small to medium companies to increase business automation. To quickly become touch-less and contactless, owners used technology solutions managed by third-party suppliers to guide the new network of online business communication,...
Principles of Successful Supplier Relationship Management
A Shifting Landscape is Changing Supplier Relationships The past year underscored the impact and the importance of supply chains more than ever. For manufacturers and distributors, the criticality of a robust and flexible supply chain cannot be understated. Supply...
6 Steps When It’s Time for a Software Demo
STEP 1: Contact providers and arrange demonstrations A new day is here and you can finally start contacting potential suppliers for your new software. If you already have a short list to begin with, you can start right away. Software suppliers come in several flavors,...
Prophet 21 Event: Servers, Financials & Supply Chains
With summer in full swing, distributors are on the move, crossing docks, splitting shipments, and delivering goods by the truckload to a diverse array of customers. It is a time for expansion—of old trade routes of supply chains and of new opportunities as our...
Software & Vendor Selection: Where to Look
The Best ERP Software Begins with the Best People At every step, from software selection to ERP implementation, people are always your best resource.Back-feed your software & vendor selection script with experiential feedback.Now that the internal part of the work...
Don’t Avenge a Cyber Attack – Prevent It
One cyber world story that captivated me as a youth was the character of “Ultron,” as depicted in comic books and in the movie adaptation of The Avengers. The character was a breed of artificial intelligence created with the intent of protecting the earth. But he...
Understanding the New Client Architecture of Prophet 21
Software development never stands still. I remember a time where I felt like I had finally come to understand DataSets, DataTables, DataRows and DataViews, only to have a much more experienced developer inform me that the System.Data namespace was old, antiquated, and...
Getting Selective with Software Selection
Begin by gathering both business requirements & software requirements After all that inward looking, it is time for some more inward looking. It's now time to set a basis for communication that will help keep current and future software projects on track. It's...
Manufacturing Cybersecurity by the Numbers
Old Cyber Risks, New Cybersecurity Rules Longtime NHL coach and living legend Scotty Bowman once famously claimed that “statistics are for losers.” For a game filled with numbers, that was a pretty bold statement. Around the same time, business author Peter Drucker, a...
How Manufacturers Can Prevent a Cyber Security Breach
Cyber security solutions are technological processes and practices designed to protect networks, computers, programs and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access. Over the years, they have become a necessity in order for industrial firms to succeed....
How To Begin Your Software Selection
Toward a Simple Software Selection Process A very typical software selection process begins by clicking on “I am interested” after reading about a software product. Someone replies, and pretty soon a salesperson has you convinced their product will have you living the...