CASE STUDY
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that can help it stay on top of its business operations at all times. The team did look around at options available in the market including solutions from leading ERP vendors. sure to various key considerations, they finally settled down with the choice of deploying Epicor ERP. “We started looking for a suitable solution. We looked at options from over 8 vendors. Everyone was in agreement because of the reporting limitations with the earlier solution. Epicor’s ERP solution emerged as the favorite among contenders as it was able to meet functional capabilities that the group wanted and further it came at an affordable price, making it the most suitable candidate. In addition, Epicor and its partner were committed to do the deployment within the narrow window of six months as per the requirements of Multiplex. “Epicor was able to commit to meet our target of going live by Jan 2017. With other vendors, that wasn’t looking possible with likely time frame of 9 months to one year of implementation likely in those cases,” says Maju Kumar. The solution was deployed by Cork Information Technology, a leading Epicor partner in the region. Epicor provided extensive POC (proof of concept) demos before Multiplex decided on the solution. The presales was done by Epicor and thereafter, everything else including POC, implementation and post sales was done together with the partner. In-depth POC was provided across the entire process cycle and scenario wise, from purchase booking to expense booking to invoicing, warehouse management etc before proceeding with deployment. As targeted, the deployment itself was completed in record time within six months and the group was able to deploy the ERP across its various businesses, bringing centralized control over the operations on real time basis.
SUBRAMANIYAN IYER
Head of Finance, Multiplex International
“
WE WERE USING A LOCALLY DEVELOPED ERP APPLICATION
IT SERVED ITS PURPOSE FOR SOME TIME BUT THEN ISSUES STARTED CROPPING UP. THESE INCLUDED LIMITATIONS ON MANY FRONTS INCLUDING REPORTING, COST OF SALES, STOCK AND CUSTOMER AGING ETC. FURTHER, THE SYSTEM WASN’T SECURE.”
Kumar elaborates, “We did look at options from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP etc. While we looked at all aspects, the major factors were feasibility and the cost benefit analysis. While several of the options we looked into were excellent products, the Epicor proposition looked to provide the best cost to benefit ratio. The entire deployment took 6 months with the distribution part going live in Jan 2017 as targeted. For retail, it took longer as we went store by store. It took two additional months. There are 35
retail stores and each of these wee migrated to the new Epicor software.”
REAPING BENEFITS Multiplex has gone for implementation of most modules that are part of Epicor ERP. The product bundling function has been included as the group needs it often Business to create new product bundles, which then are effectively seen as new items. Iyer says, “With the earlier solution, product bundling was a laborious process as costs had to be entered separately on Excel and manually managed. With Epicor, the cost control of bundled SKUs is managed automatically and it has become much easier to create new product bundles for our retail customers. So that has reduced the possibilities of errors in costing.” A key benefit with Epicor ERP has been at the point of sale registers. It has now become feasible to execute discounts for specific stores and also have real time stock updates. Iyer elaborates, “We couldn’t do implementation of discounts at the POS in stores earlier. For instance, if we wanted to have a 5%discount SMART SMB | MAY 2018