Custom Epicor 9 Dashboard Makes Shipping More Economical
As an Epicor 9 consulting and development company, we come across situations where customers are held back from implementing the best and most logical business process because their stock installation of Epicor doesn't have an ideal solution to fit the process. Almost every business has unique processes that make them competitive and its critical that they be able to customize Epicor 9 to make it fit those processes rather than simplify their process to fit the software.
The Problem - Lack of Visibility in Epicor 9
One of our clients, a US-based manufacturer that is running Epicor 9, has a unique business process. Their sales group needs to obtain some final shipping information at a point prior to the "need by date" of an order release. They then “organize” a shipment based upon specific information on each order/line/release. Since the standard Epicor 9 ERP software package does not support this type of processing, our client approached us to see if a custom Epicor dashboard could be built to deliver this specific information in a specific way.
The Solution - A New Custom Epicor 9 Dashboard
What was our solution? Since standard Epicor doesn't have a good way of displaying all of this information at once, our Epicor developer and programming group designed and built a new, custom dashboard called the "Capable to Build” or “Capable to Ship” dashboard.
Given the dynamic nature of the customer’s shipments, it often made sense to bundle orders and shipments together to save on freight and to get the order into the customer's hands much more quickly. When the user logs into Epicor and brings up the dashboard, all open orders are queried and then put into groups based on certain “header” information. This information usually consisted of 'Ship To' location, 'Ship By' location, 'Need by Date', etc. By clicking on this header record, users could then see the detail records (the order lines) that fit into that group. More often than not, these order lines were from a collection of different orders. This ability to group disparate orders together based on different pieces of header data is where the true strength of this new Epicor dashboard could be seen.
Once the user had all of this data assembled and available to view, we allowed them to firm, or create, the actual records they would use to base their shipments off of. The dashboard would continue to load open orders, but once an order(s) was firmed, the orders were considered closed. These firmed records were then used to create shipments, which finalized their business process. The next logical step for a phase 2 for the dashboard will be to use these firmed records to create the actual shipment records.
Our client recognized the value of investing in an Epicor customization that made them a better and more competitive company. If you are holding back on implementing a business process that will make you more competitive, just because there is not a great solution in Epicor, then we need to talk!