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ERP Software

News: ACDC Lighting Appoints Epicor to Put Growth in the Spotlight

Epicor Software

May 10, 2011 — Epicor Software Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise business software solutions for the midmarket and divisions of Global 1000 companies, has informed Select's newsroom that ACDC Lighting, the global manufacturer and distributor of LED and cold cathode architectural lighting, has selected the Epicor’s next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The company undergoes a complete review of its systems and business processes.

With 100 staff at its Lancashire-based site and a turnover of GBP 11m, ACDC Lighting has a 40-50% growth year-over-year for three years running. The company now distributes products to over 50 territories. For the next two years ACDC has ambitious goals to reach a turnover of GBP 20m for which it expects to employ 120-150 staff.

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Ian Clark, financial director at ACDC Lighting, commented “Our continued growth plans for the future mean that we need to unify and integrate the systems that underpin our business. 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 before—our current systems and processes are starting to creek under that weight.”

All systems within the organisation, including a number of commercial products for specific business functions, databases and scores of spreadsheets will be replaced by the Epicor deployment. ACDC Lighting believes it will give its personnel the means needed to focus on higher value tasks that make them more motivated and effective, and deliver improved service to customers.

Clark added: “Our current systems are very labour intensive; staff can spend a lot of time moving between different spreadsheets, which is frustrating for them and makes the business less agile. 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.”

ACDC Lighting is about to re-engineer its business processes as part of the Epicor implementation to obtain the perfect balance between software controlled automation and the best practice processes for the business. The management team expects to see the ability to properly understand the business at all levels, as one of the greatest benefits. Based on timely reporting and dashboards that will enable them to react quickly to changes in order books, the supply chain, or manufacturing complications.

Epicor Software

Epicor was selected after twenty ERP solutions were reviewed. The management team was particularly impressed with Epicor’s configurators, intuitive interface, customer relationship management (CRM) and remote salesforce features, and Microsoft® Office integration. Last year the company produced over 2,500 variants based on a core set of 50 products.

Clark concluded: “The Epicor Configurators will allow our sales teams to easily specify the customisations on our core products to give customers accurate quotes. These customised orders will then seamlessly move through Epicor to manufacturing, distribution and finance, saving huge amounts of time and unnecessary complexity."

Craig Stephens, director, product marketing for Epicor commented: "As companies move into the next stage of their growth, finding an ERP solution that balances the needs of the business now, and in the future, without being too complex can be a real challenge. Solutions that are too complex can bring an organisation to its knees either through technical issues, or users simply not being able to get to grips with them. We’ve worked very hard at Epicor to ensure our products put the power of the solution into the hands of customer, so it can be customised to reflect their changing needs, and users can work with an interface that is familiar and intuitive.”

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