Rubber and Plastics

Supporting Key Initiatives for the Rubber and Plastics Industries

Rubber and plastics manufacturers facing increased global pressure are stressed to find new efficiencies. Price sensitivity, volatile raw material cost, shorter product lifecycles, and adoption of quality and value added services continue to erode already thin margins.

In response, many manufacturers are expanding their traditional business and looking for new opportunities—some in new and unknown markets and others centered in business performance. Lean initiatives are driving many manufacturers to reengineer business processes from the plant floor to the top floor and throughout the extended supply chain.

These same businesses are enjoying business-wide costs savings, reduction in raw material and work in process inventories, improved throughput with heightened resource utilization, and overall improvement in customer satisfaction. Epicor understands the demands placed on manufacturers today.

Epicor for Rubber and Plastics is a global enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution designed for organizations that manufacture and distribute rubber and plastics products to a variety of industries including; industrial machine, automotive, aerospace and defense, electronics and electrical, medical device, energy and more. Whether the focus of your business is on extrusion, injection mold, thermoform, fabrication, film or plastic bags, Epicor is uniquely positioned to manage the requirements of these industries supporting simple-to-complex build plans, including prototyping, complex family molds, make-to-order, stock or mixed-mode environments with a single, comprehensive solution.

Improve Operational Visibility

Taking stock of core business operations in an integrated fashion is, for many manufacturers, the initial step in improving bottom line revenues through greater visibility of office and plant floor operations. Through integrated ERP technology, your business removes redundant processes and improves accuracy of information to provide better customer service and centralized operational management. Epicor for Rubber and Plastics is a completely integrated solution for managing your business. From Marketing and Sales through Production and Planning, Sourcing, Procurement, Customer Service and Finance, modular in its design, Epicor for Rubber and Plastics offers flexibility in deployment as modules can be purchased and “turned on” during appropriate phases of implementation.
Make Your Customer, the Focus of Your Business

Many manufacturers find that partnering with a select group of customers is more profitable. Maintaining these highly developed relationships requires strong communication coupled with agility and flexibility to quickly respond to these customers change in demand while being able to quickly respond and supply these value-added services.

Epicor for Rubber and Plastics offers a suite of functionality designed to assist your organization in putting the demands of your customer first. Through embedded customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, we ensure that all customer communication is fluid throughout the organization, providing complete workflow for each cost-based estimate with customer signoff as a stage of the initial design or estimate—closing the loop with customer service which logs each customer inquiry and provides comprehensive escalation workflow when needed.

Reduce Cost without Compromising Quality

Many manufacturers are getting back to basics and looking to reduce waste with stronger cost control and management of key cost elements. Through efficient management of the buying process, today’s businesses are using just in time techniques for procurement of material. Additionally, buyers are looking for new ways to drive down margins with suppliers. Good forecasting and demand requirements provide better buying power. Epicor for Rubber and Plastics includes inventory control alongside material requirements planning (MRP) and purchase suggestions capabilities to provide time phased material control and reduce raw material inventory being carried, enabling material to be delivered just in time. Critical to the process are strong indicators of cost and post production cost analysis. Each production run is analyzed to determine total cost broken out by material cost, material burden cost, labor cost, subcontract cost and burden cost. Based on profitability and run analysis, production management can then determine if production planning estimates need adjustment for quoting and rerun the next time.

Cradle-to-Grave Product Traceability

While strict requirements for product and material traceability are more prevalent in highly regulated industries such as aerospace and defense and medical device, many industries today are requiring strong process control with lot and serial controlled inventories throughout. Epicor offers a robust offering that tracks materials as well as tooling, finished and semi-finished products cradle-to-grave.

Maintain Supplier Status through Delivery Performance

Long-term customer relationships are the bread and butter for this industry. Maintaining supplier status is based on measurements of not only cost and quality, but delivery performance is also critical. For many manufacturers production visibility, in particular the schedule of the plant has outgrown the traditional whiteboard. It now encompasses more expansive requirements such as “what-if” scenarios, multi-resource constraints, and in some cases as a result of workforce diversification, capability-based scheduling (whether employee skill set or machine capability). With visual scheduling boards and multi-resource scheduling boards that offer color-coded load, drag-and-drop load capabilities, and drill-down functionality, master schedulers as well as production managers can accurately manage change and respond to overload constraints proactively.

For manufacturers responding to the question, “When can you deliver?” during the sales cycle, Epicor offers true capable-to-promise capability that absorbs the requirements for the sales order into the scheduling using appropriate finite capacity and MRP rules to offer an accurate delivery date. Simple acceptance of the sales order moves the requirement into production and procurement.

Use Lean Methodology and Demand Pull Systems to Improve Lead Times and Reduce Waste

Innovative manufacturers who deploy lean methodologies business wide reap huge benefits in terms of customer satisfaction and overall business performance. For manufacturers looking to reduce wasted processes from the office to plant floor, integrated systems streamline business processes. Additionally, support for cell-based strategies to support key customer requirements as well as on the plant floor, deploying demand pull systems that are based on replenishment principals further JIT material and component efficiencies. Epicor contains embedded Kanban functionality (i.e. signal to manufacture or move product) that offers the functionality required to manage several types of electronic signals for Kanban control.

Regulatory Compliance

On top of the other challenges facing manufacturers of rubber and plastics products, a new set of governmental and industry mandated regulatory requirements that demand tight control of manufacturing process and traceability along with strict business practices are further stressing organizations. From Sarbanes-Oxley to ISO/AS/TS/QS standards, today’s manufacturer is faced with challenges that eat at the bottom line of their profits. Epicor’s robust infrastructure coupled with its comprehensive quality suite offers a comprehensive approach to automating the compliance process.
Reduce Waste in the Supply Chain

More than ever, manufacturers are looking up and down their supply chains to eliminate waste and improve bottom line results. Epicor for Rubber and Plastics promotes tighter collaboration throughout the supply chain while analyzing the same metrics that you are measured on, such as supplier shipping performance or quality ratings.

Looking for new efficiencies and measurements of supplier performance, look to automated processes for requesting RFQ’s or for sending change orders through electronic queues on supplier portals or more directly through EDI.

Support Extended and Global Operations

With competitive pressures driving many manufacturers to expand globally where labor is considerably less expensive and the recent trend in plant consolidations, many manufacturers today both large and small find themselves suddenly managing multiple sites disparately.

Epicor for Rubber and Plastics has comprehensive multi site capabilities coupled with global presence to meet your company’s requirements for local support. Competing globally and domestically—bridging geographic and strategic diversity and eliminating supply chain inefficiencies—can be accomplished with the technologies to streamline intra-company and inter-company processes and communicate quickly and accurately. Synchronization of complex relationships which determine supply, demand and fulfilment is the means to reaching new, industry-leading levels of business performance. Epicor for Rubber and Plastics can help you achieve maximum efficiencies across your globally extended enterprise.

Robust Technology Framework

Epicor is uniquely positioned with a complete suite of applications based on 100% Web services technology, protecting your investment in software and services well into the future. Why are Web services so important to businesses, particularly in Rubber and Plastics?

Outside of all the reasons organizations look to Web services for deployment; speed, stability, reusability, and more; for midsize manufacturers, the incentive is eminent to drive electronic collaboration more firmly into their supply chain. Web services collaboration is fast becoming a necessity to doing business. Supporting your business strategies with applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) keeps the door open for fabrication businesses by meeting both the immediate requirement for scalability while supporting an open philosophy in the event your business strategy changes. SOA simplifies the coming together of established infrastructures to make acquisition and merger less painful—attractive to companies looking to acquire.

Industry Leading Service and Support

Epicor has over 20 years of experience delivering industry focused, world-class solutions, and ongoing customer care and service to over 20,000 customer installations. It is a true global solutions partner with support offices all over the world. The key vehicle that transforms Epicor for Rubber and Plastics into a successful business solution is our Signature Implementation Methodology. Signature allows Epicor to provide consistent, customer-focused implementations that deliver added value because it provides a controlled environment. It is a highly structured, proven implementation methodology that successfully guides you and your company through a step process, from an in-depth analysis of your business requirements all the way to the hand over, enabling your company to quickly begin using Epicor for Rubber and Plastics in day-to-day operations saving you time and money by providing broad functionality at a lower total cost of ownership.

Epicor has over 20 years of experience delivering industry focused, world-class solutions, and ongoing customer care and service to over 20,000 customer installations. It is a true global solutions partner with support offices all over the world. The key vehicle that transforms Epicor for Rubber and Plastics into a successful business solution is our Signature Implementation Methodology. Signature allows Epicor to provide consistent, customer-focused implementations that deliver added value because it provides a controlled environment. It is a highly structured, proven implementation methodology that successfully guides you and your company through a step process, from an in-depth analysis of your business requirements all the way to the hand over, enabling your company to quickly begin using Epicor for Rubber and Plastics in day-to-day operations saving you time and money by providing broad functionality at a lower total cost of ownership.