We are a Canadian medical device manufacturer, moving from Quickbooks and paper systems to Epicor Public Cloud. We use Salesforce and Office 365, including SharePoint Online. We are primarily Make To Order, with some outsourced manufacturing. We have direct and distribution sales channels in the US and Canada. We are currently about 60 staff, most of which are at our head office in Calgary. We will be starting with 18 Epicor users.
Key modules beyond base are Advanced Materials Management, Enhanced Quality, and MRP. We have one integration that seems to be a moving target (Salesforce, web store (WooCommerce)) - Epicor is deprecating their Salesforce Integration in favour of Jitterbit, so we are exploring that and other options.
We are working with Six S Consulting as our implementation partner. We are currently in the Foundation Education stage, and will be moving to Unit Testing starting next week. We have an aggressive timeline, with go-live planned for the end of January 2020.
Feel free to touch base - peer contacts are always appreciated, especially in Canada
Words of advice for your implementation: Make sure you have your processes of how you do things today down in writing from “quote to cash” and match that up with how you will do things in Epicor. Don’t think that you have to replace everything everyone does with a way to do it in Epicor from the start. If it’s a manual process, it may be beneficial to still do it as a manual process until people become more familiar with how Epicor functions. If it’s a spreadsheet, you may want to maintain that for awhile. Taking on too much at one time and doing it aggressively can set you up for failure.
Feel free to ask questions. You may want to just read what other people are asking in the beginning to get a feel for the group itself.
Thanks, Beth! We have full business process maps, along with details - we started with that early in the project. We will be mapping that onto Epicor as we go through the next phase of the project. We are very aware of the risks of scope creep, particularly with an aggressive timeline, so we are trying to keep things simple, and have deferred a number of items to possibly be implemented in later phases. All great advice - thanks again!
Good luck, Glen. I work for a pharmaceutical manufacturer in South Carolina and realize that implementing Epicor in pharma has some challenges. Thomas Massey
Thanks, Thomas! We are a Class II device manufacturer, so not quite as heavily regulated as pharma (assuming mostly Class III, although I am not that knowledgeable in this area). Part 11 compliance is definitely a regulatory burden that we will need to address as we move to Epicor.
@ProgTech Welcome to the forum! Good luck on the implementation! @Beth provided some great pointers for sure. We have some sites that are still folding in modules. We just brought the asset module online at one of the locations, and are planning to move from manual “Excel” tracking of NCRs and other quality items into the Enhanced Quality module in early November right now. Enjoy!
We had to disable a lot of functionality to comply with Part 11. I also had to turn on BPMs to log changes. In general, Epicor allowed more changes than we
wanted so we spent time turning off functionality.
