ACDC Lighting implements Epicor to light up growth

The £11m turnover, Lancashire-based firm has seen three years of 40—50% growth and says it is aiming for £20m turnover in the next two years. Hence the new system, says Ian Clark, financial director at ACDC Lighting. "Our growth plans mean that we need to unify and integrate the systems that underpin our business," he explains. "We started as a relatively small company with 20 staff and didn't have a need for an ERP system. But the time has come to get the systems in place that will help, rather than hinder, our expansion. Our transaction sizes and volumes continue to grow and we have more staff then ever [so] our current systems and processes are starting to creak." Epicor's ERP software will replace all systems, including several commercial business products, databases and spreadsheets. Clark believes the new system will give staff the tools needed to focus on higher value tasks "that make them more motivated and effective", as well as delivering improved service to customers. "Our current systems are very labour intensive; staff can spend a lot of time moving between spreadsheets, which is frustrating for them and makes the business less agile," explains Clark. "They have a huge amount of experience that is wasted on fighting with cumbersome processes to produce reports, or tasks that we know can be automated. For example, we want people in our procurement department to be focused on extracting the best from our supplier partnerships, not chasing paperwork," he explains. Clark says ACDC Lighting intends to re-engineer its business processes as part of the Epicor implementation. One of the greatest benefits, he reckons, will be the ability "to understand the business at all levels," with timely reports and dashboards enabling the team to react quickly to changes in order books, the supply chain, or manufacturing complications. As for why Epicor, he says that ACDC reviewed 20 ERP solutions and that the team was particularly impressed by Epicor's Microsoft Office integration, CRM, remote sales force features, intuitive interface and the configurators. "The Epicor configurators will allow our sales teams to easily specify the customisations on our core products to give customers accurate quotes," explains Clark. "Customised orders will then seamlessly move through Epicor to manufacturing, distribution and finance, saving huge amounts of time and unnecessary complexity."