Marshall Aerospace selects Epicor for business transformation project
1 min read
Aircraft maintenance, engineering and operations giant Marshall Aerospace has selected Epicor 9 ERP to support a multi-phase change management project that, it says, will transform the organisation's business processes.
Epicor 9 will replace a 10 year-old finance system, as well as much of its 20 year-old, internally-developed Tandem system.
Alan Paul, head of ICT and security, explains that Epicor will take over all HR functions, along with purchasing, inventory, warehousing, sales processing and project management, as well as enabling process enforcement across the business.
And he adds that, within the Aerostructures and Systems division, Epicor will also provide production and management functionality for medium volume manufacturing runs.
"This is a huge business transformation project for Marshall Aerospace, that will not only unify our systems and processes across the organisation, but provide an ERP platform to support our long-term strategic goals in line with our 'Horizon 2020' company growth strategy," states Paul.
"We're looking at all our processes and questioning how we can make them better. We'll be using Epicor to provide us with greater efficiencies and to enforce the new processes we put in place," he adds.
Paul says that one of the key aspects is removing "the islands of automation" and "controlling our workflows across departments", wherever possible, within the new single solution.
"Tandem has served us very well, but our existing finance solution has reached the end of its natural life," continues Paul. "One of the biggest challenges the IT team face is that it has become increasingly difficult to introduce modern concepts into the system.
"Whenever there is a process, HR, or mandatory change this has to be manually programmed into the system. Epicor will allow us to remove that cumbersome step, improving processes in the IT department and the wider company."
As for why Epicor, Paul says simply: "Epicor was by far the most modern and flexible of the ERP systems that we reviewed. It has clearly been re-architected as a modern ERP system, not simply given a new skin, which was our suspicion of others."
He also likes the Microsoft Office integration features, which will, he says, allow staff to work outside Epicor, in applications such as Outlook, and carry out actions on workflow items.
"We found many of the other vendors to be quite dogmatic, whereas Epicor understood this was a business transformation project that would require flexibility from everyone to succeed," he states.
