How to Get More Value Out of Your Epicor ERP
So you have an Epicor ERP, but maybe it’s not quite cutting it for your business. Now what?
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is to businesses what a pantry is to a bag of groceries. Maybe that’s not a perfect analogy, but it means that an ERP is ultimately what allows you to integrate all of the processes within your company into one place. Processes like planning, inventory, sales, finance, and others are taken from their different aisles at the market and housed in a single hub. There, each of these necessary processes can be referenced, leveraged, and, most importantly, seen in a single place. Your most critical business information is now at your fingertips, waiting to be used in the perfect dish.
However, what happens when simply having the ingredients in one place isn’t quite enough? Taking an entire market and moving it to your home is overwhelming at best and frustratingly inefficient at worst.
When is your Epicor ERP not enough?
If you have an ERP, you likely don’t need to be convinced of its benefits. Enhanced reporting, better customer service, process automation, and cost savings are just a few of the draws of Epicor software. Ultimately, Epicor ERP’s main task is to collect enterprise data in a unified and centralized repository.
The problem is that collecting data with an ERP doesn’t automatically lead to your data being useful to you. Back to the grocery analogy, at some point, having more ingredients with no recipes leaves you to figure things out on your own. When you reach the point of realization that your data is effectively useless without interpretation, analysis, and actionable insights, it’s time to start considering new solutions.
Getting More Value with Business Intelligence (BI)
If you want to get more value out of your Epicor ERP, there are a few things you can do, but the first place to look is Business Intelligence (BI). BI is the recipe for your ingredients.
Like an ERP, BI gives a holistic view of your business operations. Its use case can also be high-level strategic and tactical actions to your customer demands, enabling businesses to operate more efficiently and increase profitability. However, BI doesn’t stop there.
The primary benefit of BI is the ability to create dashboards and reports for specific roles within your company. These dashboards deliver detailed, transparent views of the business’s current state because they’re based on YOUR data. The role of BI is to identify trends within your business, then tell you how to fix, improve, or eliminate inefficiencies. All this means is more money in your pocket.
The Right BI Tool
ERP systems help companies consolidate siloed data, while BI tools interpret large datasets to encourage real-world action. An integrated ERP-BI tech stack brings the benefits of both tools together to analyze operations and processes, promote meaningful action, and create robust reports.
The right BI tool is one that will seamlessly integrate with your Epicor ERP software and take the manual analysis off your hands so you can spend more time driving sales and boosting your revenue.
White Cup BI by White Cup is a business intelligence software that will quickly distill data. It’s purpose-built for distributors to uncover more sales opportunities, improve customer communications, and spot customer performance trends. It’s proven to give instant insight into customer, supplier, and product performance at all times.
