encompass solutions discounted remote services and straining seminars

ESI Discounted Consulting

To address the increasing call for our services and the remote requirements businesses currently need to adopt, we’ve

To address the increasing call for our services and the remote requirements businesses currently need to adopt, we’ve expanded our emphasis on remote consulting and implementation services. This slower time could be an opportunity, while people have the bandwidth, to prepare to scale up for future growth.

You can tailor these combined training seminars and implementation services to topics specific to projects currently underway or planned in your organization. The benefit of combining these two services remotely results in better use of your time and money.

We are also discounting consulting blocks to make these services more easily available to businesses.

ESI Discounted Consulting Blocks

Adapting to constrained means of producing and delivering your products and services doesn’t have to impact business continuity. To ensure your organization suffers minimal disruption of day-to-day operations, we want you to be able to take advantage of our experience at a much lower cost to your business.

There are a few scenarios where only one or two hours of consulting work may be needed in training or implementing new systems and components. That said, Encompass Solutions will discount consulting hours by a significant amount.

You can choose to make these seminars group sessions, where the audience sits in on actual project work being done in real-time. Alternatively, you may opt for these sessions to be 1-on-1 consulting engagements or as purely discounted work based on your project specifications. Remain operational and profitable, while your staff can participate in on-the-job training as the work is being completed by our implementation specialists and consultants.

Sample Workshops And Initiatives

We’ve listed several of our more popular projects to give an idea of how these discounted consulting hours can be used to benefit your business. Packages to guide you through value-added tasks while operations are slow or idled include:

Physical Inventory and Cycle Counting

If a factory is idle, this is a great time to perform a full physical while inventory is not moving.  With accurate inventory, once business picks up, you can be sure you can effectively use MRP and purchase suggestions with trusted output, and make better inventory decisions.

Once you have your inventory trued up, cycle counts, when used properly, will let you keep your inventory accuracy high and remove the need for a year-end full physical inventory.

Typically we can remotely assist a client that has no prior knowledge of performing a Physical Inventory with a couple of hours of training, a hands-on workshop, and some remote support during the physical inventory itself.

Discounted Cost: $1,200 – includes seminar, training, set-up, and follow-up questions

Preventative Maintenance

Epicor sells the Maintenance Management module to manage the maintenance department and its requests. The module also provides the framework for setting up preventative maintenance schedules, as well as planning and creating maintenance jobs.

With a factory idled, it’s a great time to schedule maintenance and set up this module for maintaining machinery, define maintenance plans by machine so that after a certain number of hours it can be flagged for maintenance, and be able to design and test so that when the plant is at full operational capacity, maintenance runs itself.

Discounted Cost: $600 – includes seminar, training, set-up, and follow-up questions

Fixed Assets

Many companies own this module, but its typically brought online after an initial implementation project as a Phase 2 component.  The Fixed Assets module lets you track your fixed assets and set deprecation schedules, that integrate automatically to the general ledger, reducing the need for manual depreciation calculations at the end of your financial year.  It’s also integrated with the Maintenance Management module to align with the same equipment – setting up for one module will ease the implementation of the other.

Using downtime to set up and automate the handling of depreciation now, will mean one less task to be performed at the end of every financial year.

Discounted Cost: $300 – includes seminar, training, set-up, and follow-up questions

Costing

Many of our customers have questions about how Epicor handles job costing. This can be a complex area. Every company will have a costing model that works best for them – standard costing, average costing, FIFO, and Last Cost are all different costing methods supported by Epicor ERP, and choosing the correct costing model has big implications for how costing is reported to the general ledger.

Having accurate costing will also highlight red-flag materials (both raw materials and finished goods) that need to be focused on to improve and maintain profitability. This targeted consulting event would be specific to your organization and would be comprised of a training component, recommendations from us based on conversations with your business, and support in setting this up in your environment.

Discounted Cost: $2,400 – includes T account explanation and costing model comparison, discovery and design, system configuration, testing, and rollout.

Project Management Module

The Project Management module lets you tie all the activities for a project, and get an overview of all the costs involved.   This is especially good for long-term projects, allowing you to track sales expenses, orders, engineering design time, purchasing and manufacturing costs, and provide a full overview of the entire project from beginning to end.   Being able to tie all this information together automatically is a huge timesaver, you no longer have to write custom reports, or manually pull information together.  For many customers, especially those selling to government agencies, for example, being able to set milestone billing,  or providing a percentage of completion billing that would other be a very manual and cumbersome process.   Epicor’s Project Management module also provides for revenue recognition, both at the phase, and project level.  It also fully integrates with the general ledger within Epicor ERP.

Discounted Cost: $3,600 to $4,800 (depending on requirements) – includes T account explanation and costing model comparison, discovery and design, system configuration, testing, and rollout. Note: Typical consulting time around a Project Management engagement takes 2-3 days, depending on the customer requirements

Case Management

This is a Customer support tool, that many people have licensed, and are not leveraging.  Case Management allows an organization to use a case as a ‘binder’ to track customer issues, and tie together the relevant quotes,  sales orders, jobs, materials, RMA processing, and solutions together for a holistic view of the customer’s resolution – it’s particularly useful in the quality area.  The use of Case Management allows your organization to build up a knowledge base, to be referred to should another customer have a similar issue in the future.  With this module, you can track KPIs, like time to resolution, and SLA commitments.    Epicor’s Task Management system can also be leveraged here.

Discounted Cost: $300 – includes training and follow-up questions

Task Management 

Many people have access to Epicor’s Task Management system.  Task Sets are embedded into Epicors Quotation, Engineering, and Case Management modules. Having a structured set of tasks within a case, quote, or engineering workflow, aids in ensuring that your team adheres to your company’s best-practice standard procedures, and ensures compliance.

Discounted Cost: $300 – includes training and follow-up questions

Enhanced Quality Module

Epicor’s Enhanced Quality module builds on the foundations of the standard quality module, allowing you to design and configure inspection plans that tie to your organization’s quality needs using out-of-the-box software.    This is often used to ensure correct equipment calibration, in conjunction with the Maintenance module.

Discounted Cost: $1,200 – includes training and workshop to design a simple ‘first quality configurator’. Note: Typical consulting time around an advanced quality engagement could be several days depending on the complexity of the configurations and different product lines involved.

Discounted Consulting Terms and Conditions

We don’t want to introduce a menagerie of needless rules regarding these discounts, but we also need to be respectful of our consultants’ livelihood and schedule. To be eligible for discounted consulting hours, one must:

  1. Make your purchase of consulting hours by the end of April 2020.
  2. Bulk packages must be paid for upfront.
  3. Hours must be used by the end of 2020.
  4. Prices are based on estimates. This may increase or decrease based on the customer’s unique business processes and requirements.
  5. Services discounts only apply to new services deals.
  6. Discounted consulting engagements will require a deposit.
  7. Discounts are off the list price, not a currently negotiated rate.
  8. Discounts are capped at rates depending on the type of work and volume. 

About Encompass Solutions

Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers and Distributors. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass has helped modernize operations and automate processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, and renovation of existing systems, Encompass provides a specialized approach to every client’s needs. By identifying customer requirements and addressing them with the right solutions, we ensure our clients are equipped to match the pace of the Industry.

Sean Balogh

About Sean Balogh

A marketing professional working hard to deliver relevant and engaging content to audiences in education, technology, and manufacturing.