This post is a continuation of Epicor and its relationship to inventory-based enterprises. Please see part one, which covers Epicor basics and demand planning.
Epicor Inventory & Operational Analytics
Inventory Optimization & Control
This is the bulk of what most of you are here to read about. Retail businesses alone shed over $1 trillion in profits a year due to stock-outs and overstocks. And, in today’s fragile, chaotic, and highly-connected supply chain, inventory optimization is the single most in-demand supply chain solution on the market.
Like many other Goliath WMS and ERPs (e.g., Dynamics 365, JDE, NetSuite, Sage X3, etc.), Epicor offers a variety of inventory optimization and control features. While this isn’t going to be a comprehensive list (due to the sheer number of available solutions), this should serve as a baseline. These inventory control features are nearly universal across Epicor Prophet 21, Epicor Eagle, Epicor ERP, Epicor Eclipse, and Epicor Prelude:
- Cycle count
- Seasonal items
- Cross-check orders against inventory policies
- Basic reconciliation capabilities
- Detailed reporting
- Lot generation and tracking
- Safety stock analysis (min-max)
- Customer/supplier inventory management
- Multi-facility inventory control
Again, if you have hyper-specific inventory control requirements, we highly recommend connecting with Epicor to discuss those. However, regardless of the Epicor solution you choose, StockIQ can plug-and-play with your new ERP to provide downstream capabilities and enhanced features for your Epicor environment.
How StockIQ Enhances Epicor’s Inventory Optimization and Control Capabilities
- Stock-outs: With StockIQ, you can discover, analyze, track, and minimize stock-outs across your supply chain. Better yet, we help you discover why your stock-outs are happening — so that you never have to deal with them again.
- Dead inventory: Even with the best analytics and forecasting, you can’t predict everything. Sometimes, things don’t work out, and you need to get some dead weight off the books. We help you move that dead inventory to make space for new, highly-sellable items.
- Excess: StockIQ can help you identify excess inventory and balance that inventory across facilities.
- Service level: We let you define your service-level targets and monitor against them across your facilities and inventory infrastructure.
- MRP engine: StockIQ’s full MRP engine helps you manage everything from kitting to full manufacturing across and between warehouses, facilities, and assemblies.
- Turns: StockIQ helps you monitor for turns to prevent stock-outs and overstocks.
- Inventory expiration: We help you understand and track your shelf-life-based inventory.
Operational Analytics
In addition to inventory controls, Epicor offers impressive operational analytics intelligence to help you fully understand your inventory, any inefficiencies, and any benchmarks you may need to adjust. Operational analytics is the “why” of inventory control. It gives you the information you need to determine “why” stock-outs may be happening or “why” suppliers may be underperforming.
In addition to its operational intelligence, Epicor also gives you a variety of KPIs directly on your dashboard. These include things like time-to-ship, stock-out events, and fill rates. Of course, we’re only talking about Epicor’s inventory-based operational analytics; there are still plenty of BI and analytics surrounding manufacturing and finances included in the Epicor ERP.
How StockIQ Enhances Epicor’s Operational Analytics
- S&OP: With StockIQ, you can break down your inventory into product-groups, categories, or even item level detail to drive top-down or bottom-up forecasting and operational intelligence across any inventory hierarchy. We even let you import this granular data straight into your Epicor environment for smarter, faster, and more accurate analytics.
Epicor + StockIQ: Building A Smart, Effective, & Holistic Inventory Solution
Whether you choose Epicor, Dynamics 365, Netsuite, or any other ERP/WMS on the market, StockIQ can help you drive meaningful value into your inventory controls. Our solution was built to handle a variety of inventory-based needs, and we play nice with virtually every solution on the market. Want to learn more? Contact us.
