Dyer Engineering drives growth with Epicor ERP software

Jim Athey, operations systems manager at Dyer Engineering, says it's all about improving flexibility, usability and capacity planning to drive future growth. "We have always had challenges with capacity planning in the existing solution," explains Athey. "We have developed in-house reports, but we want capacity planning to be at the heart of our manufacturing business as we grow," he continues. "We want our production planning to recalculate resourcing and material needs as new orders are created, or supply chain delays encountered." Dyer Engineering also plans to use the dashboard features in Epicor to give much better control and information to engineers on the shopfloor – allowing them to use touch screens to interact with the information they need – he adds. "It was essential to us that we selected an ERP solution with a heritage in manufacturing that could support our business processes," says Athey. "Many of the solutions we looked at had started as finance systems, then added some stock control, then tried to add some MRP features. With Epicor, it was clearly a complete manufacturing system first and foremost, with excellent support for other business areas woven into that core." As for the detail, Athey says his team was impressed by the flexibility offered by Epicor, with features such as user-customisable application screens, its ability to interface with and connect the shopfloor to the ERP system, as well as process flexibility through business process management (BPM) logic.