You’ve been using your Epicor® ERP for a while now, long enough to know that it’s a powerful tool on which you can structure many critical aspects of your business. When it comes to direct materials supply chains, your investment in Epicor ERP can be extended and the value maximized by adding an automation and collaboration software like SourceDay.
SourceDay brings buyers and suppliers together in one solution, automating purchase order (PO) creation and processing, consolidating communication, and giving everyone involved a clear look at always-accurate order data. This article will cover many of the benefits you’ll experience when you combine SourceDay with your Epicor supply chain management operations.
For starters, let’s talk about collaboration. It’s highly common for buyers to work long hours, sending emails, searching their inbox for replies, combing over spreadsheets hoping to find relevant information, and much more. Emails and spreadsheets are slow, cumbersome, and have lots of opportunity for error.
SourceDay eliminates all of this, giving buyers and suppliers a way to clearly communicate within the context of every PO line. Each user receives a notification about every message, notes are saved and accessible, and buyers can manage by exception, rather than getting lost in a sea of spreadsheets.
Collaboration isn’t really collaboration if everyone isn’t working off the same information. That’s why SourceDay guarantees 100% accurate order and shipment data for Epicor supply chain management operations.
Data accuracy is a common headache for direct materials supply chains. Inventory planning, demand planning, and demand management are virtually impossible without it. SourceDay connects directly to Epicor ERP, and every time a change is made within SourceDay, it is automatically updated in the ERP.
This level of supply chain visibility is virtually impossible without a truly collaborative supply chain solution like SourceDay. Consider a common example, in which a supplier can only fill part of an order. Under old manual systems for Epicor supply chain management, the buyer might not learn of the change for days, or even weeks, due to missed or delayed correspondence. In the SourceDay solution, the buyer is notified right away.
Now, teams can coordinate actions, working strategically on every order, change, and shipment to make sure parts keep arriving when they’re needed and production stays at proper levels. If a supplier is consistently late with their orders, buyers can adjust their supply strategy to complement their primary vendors with secondary options.
But, how will a buyer know the supplier is often late? With SourceDay as a part of your Epicor supply chain management approach, you get real-time supplier scorecards that are always accurate, so you can hold them accountable and adjust strategy quickly when needed.
If the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that a new disruption is always just around the corner. Diversifying your vendor base has never been easier. SourceDay standardizes the way you communicate and collaborate with them, handles all the onboarding, and guarantees a 70% supplier adoption rate. You must have a diversified supplier portfolio in order to mitigate risk, and Sourceday gets you there.
This automation and collaboration approach gets buyers out of the weeds. Out of arduous, tactical work and into strategic work that can be truly profitable for the business. Even more, a solution like SourceDay eliminates 25% of a buyer’s daily PO workload—a feat that would be virtually impossible otherwise.
Obviously this would be a huge cost savings to the business, but there’s even more than that. By bringing SourceDay into your Epicor supply chain management process, you’ll mitigate the risk of burnout and, ultimately, attrition. Manufacturers and supply chain teams are in large part successful due to the knowledge their teams have about their specific operations. This tribal knowledge is virtually impossible to replace, even if you could find someone qualified and within your budget.
Buyers are known to work long hours on evenings and weekends, just to keep up with their daily task load. Perhaps there was a time in the past when this would have been a tenable approach, but those days are long gone. If you don’t give buyers a simple workflow that they can manage in a reasonable amount of time, they’re going to jump ship. Protect your most valuable asset—your people—with simple, standardized workflows that let them keep their sanity.
Epicor supply chain management can be tricky business. Our research shows that over half of all POs will change in their lifetimes, and there’s no doubt your personal experience confirms it. You buyers can’t continue to use unreliable communication and management methods that are costly to you, hard on your teams, and ultimately put your financial stability at risk. Manual workflows might have been fine for previous generations, but they’re not enough to meet today’s demand and beat out the competition.
Epicor supply chain management teams leading their fields are now turning to technology for their everyday PO processes. Gone are the long hours of clerical work and inaccurate data. SourceDay simplifies those processes by automated the manual work, providing accurate supply chain visibility, and boosting supplier performance like never before. No matter your goals or metrics, SourceDay provides a big assist for tasks like demand planning or inventory planning.
SourceDay complements your Epicor supply chain management workflows so buyers and suppliers can communicate easily and work together to manage orders, ensure supply is predictable, and keep inventory levels right where they need to be. There’s a lot more to it, and we’d love to give you a look. Schedule a demo and let’s get to work.