Collaboration tools for manufacturers are an unsung hero of the sales cycle. However, the benefits of collaboration don’t start and stop at the bottom line. Employee stress diminishes considerably when collaboration and communication are seamless between departments. Connect your business like never before and foster a culture of collaboration in the workplace to discover just how efficiently your organization can operate with everyone on the same page and working with the same data.
Modern Collaboration Tools for Better Efficiency
Build collaboration across a tech-savvy workforce with Epicor Collaborate—the messaging platform for a connected workforce. Simple and easy to use, Collaborate has the familiarity of popular digital messaging tools—with powerful features designed for business.
Familiar concepts like tagging, liking, and sharing help promote cooperation and engagement
Cloud deployment offers easy access for a remote workforce on desktop and mobile devices
Secure, scalable messaging enabled by powerful Azure tools helps you maintain confidentiality
In less than a day, Encompass can teach your team how to use the new tool, and build collaboration with a connected workforce.
The Benefits of Epicor Collaborate
Out of the box, Collaborate comes with pre-built notifications that cover almost everything a business would need. Not only this but setting up notifications is fast and simple.
Managing the alerts you subscribe to as a user is intuitive and handled right from the Kinetic desktop.
You can message users directly, create and message groups, or message users from inside a record that needs their attention and input. All of this happens inside the ERP system, so there’s no need to clutter email inboxes.
As long as Kinetic users have a Collaborate license and credentials to access it, Encompass consultants can bring your organization online and up to speed in a single day.
For cloud users, set-up is minimal, while on-premise installations will require the expertise of an ERP systems administrator or our own Managed Services team.
Sound like a conversation worth having? Contact Us today using the link below.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or 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.
Meaningful relationships exist across your company and are a great resource for serving customers and improving efficiency. When workers engage with each other to solve problems and innovate processes, your business benefits and strengthens. By integrating unstructured meetings and conversations with your critical business ERP data and by enabling worker conversations digitally, you can help eliminate worker silos—giving your business a competitive advantage.
Epicor Collaborate is an enterprise-wide collaboration and productivity tool built on a cloud platform. Easy to use and intuitive with hashtags and mentions, Collaborate connects groups of workers simply. When your employee teams communicate digitally, you increase customer responsiveness and satisfaction.
Actionable Collaboration for Greater Productivity
Easily accessible across the Kinetic application, Collaborate, shifts workers from monitoring analytical dashboards and reports to being actively engaged with instant notifications from ERP processes and events. Collaborate with message streams to collect and communicate these messages across the enterprise. Outlier processes that often bury users in meetings or email are easily mainstreamed with the flexibility and simplicity of Collaborate—optimizing productivity. Key integrations driving worker productivity include Microsoft Teams®, Epicor IoT, Epicor Virtual Agent (EVA), and Epicor Data Discovery.
Microsoft Teams Integration enables teams with external players to connect on project details by sharing Epicor Collaborate messages.
Being notified of adverse events in ERP or directly from your equipment through Epicor IoT, can drive new levels of responsiveness and productivity.
Not every solution that improves productivity has to be complicated. Epicor Virtual Agent (EVA) delivers on simplicity through natural language to answer questions of Kinetic.
Businesses that share and coalesce around business metrics are data-driven organizations that thrive on solving problems. Collaborate offers users the ability to shared Epicor Data Discovery (EDD) metrics.
Epicor Collaborate Benefits
Epicor Collaborate allows businesses to leverage their two most important resources, information, and personnel, in tandem. Reap the benefits of an actively engaged workforce fueled by the enterprise data you need to make informed decisions, quickly. Those benefits allow your business to:
Modernize employee communication for more engaged workers
Boost team productivity and responsiveness
Experience new levels of worker efficiency
Share and action metrics as exceptions occur
Eliminate worker silos to improve customer responsiveness
Reduce time wasted with email and status update meetings
Easy to deploy
Both Kinetic in the cloud and Kinetic on premises are easy to integrate with Collaborate. There are three simple steps to get started.
Simple to learn—designed for business
Collaborate contains many of the same interface conventions your employees use at home on their devices. This makes Collaborate simple to use and quick to learn. Since employees can adopt the features with near immediacy, Collaborate can offer a fast return on investment. Available to work with Kinetic in the cloud or on-premises, Collaborate helps all users stay in touch.
Employees log into the Kinetic Home Page and select the Collaborate tab. They can then start messaging, subscribing to ERP events, and sharing knowledge. Collaborate functions are like other leading cloud-native digital messaging tools, but the feature is designed for heightened connectivity for Kinetic and your business.
The promise of the Cloud
Built on the Microsoft® Azure® platform, Collaborate is a cloud solution that leverages powerful Azure tools to deliver security and scalability for your messaging needs. More importantly, the cloud platform provides access to Collaborate on a desktop or a compatible tablet through the Epicor Home Page. Collaborate makes work happen—providing timely messages anywhere for rapid decision making.
Enterprise-wide Collaboration
Multisite, multi-company organizations need to communicate across boundaries to solve problems and remain responsive to customers. As a cloud-based solution, Epicor Collaborate delivers messaging capabilities for intercompany and inter-site conversations. Featured in this capability is the ability to create Enterprise groups that can span locations for greater business efficiency.
Share knowledge
Sharing knowledge helps businesses more easily onboard new employees and retain critical knowledge to support future operational efficiency. Making it easier for staff and departments to share information means that skills and knowledge can be pooled— leading to thorough problem solving, better project progression, and new ideas. Collaborate provides a robust repository of contextual and searchable messages to help workers find answers to repeatable customer issues, store and retrieve process knowledge, and maintain historical audits.
Operational Visibility
Subscribing to exceptions in ERP data helps business leaders respond to problems as they happen. For example, a stakeholder may subscribe to a customer or credit hold status. Once a credit hold message appears in their Collaborate message thread, stakeholders can message finance immediately to determine the reason and follow up with the customer.
Group Messaging
Employees exceedingly work in groups to drive innovation and meet customer expectations. In particular, being able to support cross-functional teams that can coalesce around a complex estimate, project, customer issue, production event whether single instance or ongoing, and more. Introducing this group functionality (both public and private) is important as members are informed on a timely basis and can offer their perspectives.
Microsoft Teams Integration
Microsoft Teams is an industry-leading collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration for businesses. It is widely used and sits alongside Microsoft Office 365® productivity tools. Collaborate with Groups connected to Microsoft Teams to share communications across users, including external guests outside of Kinetic. Note: This feature requires Microsoft Office 365 level AD.
Custom Notifications (Change Data Capture (CDC) and BPM)
Greater responsiveness in the business workflow can be more easily achieved with instant notifications guiding your processes. To offer more opportunities to build these notifications into your processes, Collaborate lets users create custom notification rules. This is achieved with the Change Data Capture (CDC) management solution.
Additionally, users can design a Business Process Management (BPM) workflow to post custom notifications in a Collaborate message stream through a new Notify Collaborate action. Users can leverage Data Directives, Method Directives, and Epicor Functions to create workflows that include the Notify Collaborate actions and the action that triggers them.
Operational Efficiency from IoT Notifications
Boosting operational oversight to deliver great performance with Epicor IoT is easier in the latest release as users can view IoT notifications within Collaborate message streams. Users can configure IoT-based notifications via BPM and feed them into Collaborate. This allows users to be notified of asset performance while collaborating with a group of stakeholders on failure situations.
Instant Answers with Epicor Virtual Agent (EVA)
EVA helps users automate mundane tasks such as looking up a contact or inventory information-all she needs is a simple text command. Integration with Collaborate supports EVA skills or commands within message streams. Ask EVA to show you a customer, and then the customer credit, and she will return richly formatted information. The experience and the skills supported are consistent with what is offered in the EVA mobile app.
File Sharing Support
Collaborate users can share files easily, selecting their preferred choice of cloud file storage system. Attaching files in the feeds and conversations speeds up teamwork in any company, and the attachment is saved in the file storage system.
Collaborate integrates with multiple cloud storage providers such as Google Drive® or Dropbox®. Epicor ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is also an option for Collaborate file storage, no matter whether Epicor ECM is Cloud or On-Premises.
More easily describe business challenges with EDD metrics in Collaborate. Users can leverage an EDD widget to snag and share EDD metrics, including comments that drive actions. New levels of productivity can result when metrics are shared and actioned as exceptions occur. Any key metric can be shared from sales, finance, or operations.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or 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.
Automate repetitive modeling processes and generate exports without wasting valuable engineering time. Epicor ConfigLink allows you to push ERP configuration parameters to configure and produce 3D models, images, and drawings of configured products.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or 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.
Senior-level executives are at the core of any big departmental change. Success and failure rest on their shoulders. They need to be involved. Despite the pressure of this role, you can help them understand they don’t need to do everything.
Their job is to ensure new strategies aligned with overall business goals and changes are laid out for employees. Your job is to convince them that Field Service Management (FSM) software does align with business goals and explain how you’ll handle the transition. Take some pressure off executives by showing them you’ve done the research to get the program off the ground and you understand what it takes to succeed.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or 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.
Not all eCommerce platforms are created equal. Epicor Commerce Connect (ECC) features are tightly integrated with ERP features, taking advantage of our customer’s investment in their ERP platform from Epicor. Look under the hood to see the many touchpoints between ECC and Epicor ERP platforms. ECC assures reliable and instantaneous bi-directional data integration between your eCommerce and ERP platforms.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or 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.
As an automotive parts or components manufacturer, you may be both encouraged and challenged by a growing number of trends in the automotive marketplace. From disruptive trends in product developments—such as electric vehicles, advanced assistance and safety capabilities, and driverless vehicles—to trade tariff increases, regulation changes, and higher interest rates, it’s apparent that change is in the air.
Production trends show that the manufacturing of most motor vehicles is on the rise—at least for SUVs, crossovers, pick-up trucks, and commercial trucks. Conversely, production is down for cars and medium-duty trucks. Ford surprised some when it announced scaling back significantly on its car offerings, continuing production on only two car models to focus more attention on its SUVs, crossovers, trucks, and commercial vehicles.
How these trends will shape the future of the automotive industry and the manufacturers that supply them remains to be seen. As an industry insider, you know that multiple factors can add up to affect the automotive industry in complex ways. New trends and the risks, opportunities, and challenges associated with them were examined recently during a presentation hosted by Today’s Motor Vehicles1 and sponsored by Epicor® Software. Read on for an overview of what’s shaping today’s auto vehicle industry.
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 modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or 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.
COVID-19 sadly and surely affects all businesses in one or another way. Depending on the outbreak stage and local governments’ decisions in response, individuals may be limited for an unknown period in leaving their homes, traveling, or working as before.
Epicor understands its customers, partners, and employees who all need to adapt to these extraordinary times.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm specializing in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers and Distributors. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates 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.
An accurate forecast is a critical supply-chain driver, but many organizations have a limited view of what comes next. Planning teams are left to interpret sales or budget projections and convert them into actionable forecasts of the item mix.
This process is often managed in complex spreadsheets that are difficult to use, scale and share. They also rely on rule-of-thumb forecasting approaches that don’t properly account for inherent demand patterns or track how forecast overrides can impact accuracy, resulting in forecast errors that can contribute to lost sales and excess inventory.
Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm specializing in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers and Distributors. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates 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.
Decimet Sales, Inc. (DSI) is a custom metal manufacturing company that specializes in precision computerized numerical control (CNC) machining and sheet metal fabrication. This includes one-stop customer service, design, prototyping, and manufacturing solutions for the retail, security, firearms, and industrial equipment industries.
Success Highlights
Challenges
Grow the company with a reporting system that tracks sales, backlogs, delivery times, and jobs at two separate facilities
Solution
Epicor® ERP
Benefits
Provided reliable, real-time information and project updates
Instantly supplied customers with the details on any past or present order
Allowed for navigation between multiple departments companywide
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 modernizes operations and automates 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.
Founded in 1952, L.B. White has grown to become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of direct-fired heaters for the agricultural, construction, and rental industries. Approximately 50 employees support the production and global distribution of more than 50,000 SKUs from the company’s headquarters in Onalaska, Wisconsin.
Success Highlights
Challenges
The reporting system was difficult to use, and the data was hard to read
Software required users to have more advanced computer skills
Solution
Epicor® ERP
Epicor Data Analytics (EDA) powered by Phocas
Benefits
Tightly integrated EDA simplified the deployment process
Out-of-the-box templates made it easy for sales and inventory teams to get started
Eliminated IT bottlenecks and the need for VPN access when outside the office
Allowed users to access EDA whenever and wherever they need it
Data is constantly updated to provide users with the most current information
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 modernizes operations and automates 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.
