Epicor VistaFeatures
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) strategies are as important to business today as they have ever been. Vista CRM helps you stay ahead of the curve and successfully meet the challenges that the market brings – helping you manage your entire customer lifecycle, from prospect to cash to care effectively, improve operational efficiency and accelerate growth – both internally and externally.
Sales and Demand Management
Quotes and sales orders enable the vital coordination of activities between your sales people, warehouses and plants, shipping and accounting teams. They facilitate efficient management of accounts, shipping, invoicing and commissions. Vista sales management provides the tools - including sophisticated product configuration - to produce accurate estimates, streamline your quote-to-cash cycle, calculate reliable estimates and improve customer service.
By streamlining the sales process — centralizing access to product, pricing, pipeline, and customer information — orders can be generated with a minimal number of steps. Resulting in increased sales productivity through accuracy during the request for quotation (RFQ) and order process stage.
Demand management responds to today’s business conditions and incorporates the requirements of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to help your company reduce lead time for planning and procurement, enabling you to respond on the production floor faster. Demand management establishes contracts that can be linked to sales orders and releases to match each customer’s unique shipping needs.
Vista sales management moves beyond the demand side of EDI, to also focus on the fulfillment side with secure outbound Advanced Ship Notice (ASN) transactions that customers reconcile with each shipment. Through inbound EDI documents, the cumulative (CUM) total value and actual received quantity is electronically sent back for reconciliation.
Vista sales management solutions deliver comprehensive SFA to help you perfect the order-to-delivery process for maximum customer satisfaction.
Supply Chain Management
Vista Supply Chain management (SCM) is complemented by an array of enterprise capabilities, including customer relationship management, supplier relationship management and supply chain execution.
For distributors that produce or assemble their items, Vista SCM goes beyond traditional kitting functionality by offering comprehensive production management. Vista is designed to simultaneously handle make-to-order, make-to-stock and engineer-to-order processing, giving you the flexibility to review and update plans as demand changes.
Whether you need to track a few transactions using barcodes and RFID tags or need to manage a set of warehouses globally, Vista SCM can help you achieve your goals, including automated route scheduling systems that integrate GPS, digital mapping data, mileage, and driving directions to support a customer’s distribution needs worldwide.
Production Management
The Vista solution offer easy-to-use production management capabilities designed to meet the needs of progressive make-to-order and mixed-mode manufacturing companies. Epicor understands that many manufacturers are complex businesses that defy categorization, often making complex products along side more straightforward repetitive ones. They require exceptionally flexible and versatile software in order to accommodate combinations of make to order, configure to order, engineer to order, and make to stock.
Whether you’re a make to order, configure to order, engineer to order or simply a make to stock business, Vista is complimented with a full range of supply chain management, supply chain execution and distribution capabilities, all delivered within a single business platform. As one would expect, Vista includes material requirements planning software, advanced quality management, product life cycle management and master data management to answer all your production management needs.
Planning and Scheduling
Vista planning and scheduling solutions offer a complete set of tools to maximize utilization of resources for optimum performance and profitability
- Forecasting and master production scheduling provide day-to-day control as well as long range planning for improved lead times and better decision making
- Manage supply and demand in real time with material requirements planning software capabilities that synch demand requirements coming from customer orders and forecasts to what’s happening on the plant floor, in the warehouse, or in the field
- Robust scheduling and advanced planning and scheduling with visual tools focused on resource optimization, capability based scheduling, material and outside resource availability, and change management
- Project Management that utilizes detailed estimation, planning, scheduling, costing, and supply chain logistics for complete control and analysis (including cross analysis) of any project
- Multi-site management to handle any combination of multiple offices, plants and warehouse (sites) or companies
Product Data Management
Vista product data management serves as a central knowledge repository for process and product history, and promotes integration and data exchange among all business users who interact with products — including project managers, engineers, sales people, buyers, and quality assurance teams. Features include:
- Bill of material (BOM) management to support single-level part formats that recognize the materials and components required to build end parts
- Multi-level BOM management incorporating single-level components and material requirements with internal and external routing steps for complete end assembly visibility, planning, scheduling, and costing
- Detailed routings that supports planning, scheduling and costing products more efficiently
- Automatic communication of changes to plant floor with visibility of latest routing production details as well as standards and resource requirements
- Full engineering change control and management, multiple revision control of products, engineering workflow management, and detailed cost analysis of products during the engineering process
- Product Lifecycle Management offers a central knowledge repository for process and product history, with interfaces to numerous computer aided design systems
- Flexible and accurate analysis of product costs on a customer-by-customer, part-by-part, and job-by-job basis
- On-the-fly configuration of highly customizable and dimensional products via a straightforward question and answer evaluation, accessible from quote, order, job or work order entry
Service Management
Whether you do field service or run an in-house service centre, improved service management will help you control your contractual obligations, service level agreements and outstanding warranties and benefit your organization in many ways. Features include:
- Vista service management software supports lean service organization requirements with comprehensive escalation management that enables you to manage customer service level agreements with full visibility of risks and potential compliance problems
- Preventive maintenance scheduling, coupled with serial number and contract management enables efficient planning of visits and resources leading increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs
- Comprehensive mobility options enable engineers on the road to maintain contact with the service centre for efficient allocation of work, immediate update of completed work and fast invoice turnaround.
Financial Management
Businesses ultimately succeed or fail based on their ability to create and manage a profitable business. The combination of a competitive, global environment and mandatory regulatory compliance means that successfully managing your finances is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities you can face.
Vista’s financial management modules are designed to automate and streamline your financial processes with tools and controls to support complex legislative requirements and create value through timely financial monitoring including:
- Accounts receivable, lockbox, credit and collections management
- Accounts payable, electronic funds transfer, automated order matching
- General ledger, allocations, consolidations and eliminations
- Cash management, bank reconciliation and statement interfaces
- Fixed asset and tax management
- Budgeting, forecasting and planning
Improved Financial Transparency and Accountability - Regulatory bodies and audit firms advocate the need for improved financial governance, yet many businesses still deal with disparate financial data sources. While departmental spreadsheets and legacy systems may provide adequate financial accounting today, as the need for centralized financial information and financial visibility increases, they quickly lose viability. Epicor financial management software supports the need for financial visibility regardless of company size.
Enterprise
Performance Management
Vista Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) helps you establish a culture of high performance where all stakeholders are keenly aware of what’s important to the company, how the company is tracking, and where their work fits in.
Vista EPM provides a complete set of tools and applications that let you plan, execute, and analyze at both strategic and tactical levels – aligning business activities with business goals. Effective business intelligence (BI) is an important component of any EPM strategy and is an integral component of Vista, enabling more effective decision making throughout your business.
EPM offers budgeting, planning and forecasting; advanced analytic applications, like business scorecards; data warehousing; business activity queries and comprehensive reports that are fully connected to Epicor business applications.
Our deep experience of major industry segments allows us to provide industry-specific and role-specific key performance indicators out of the box. That means you can get up and running quickly with performance management applications that suit your business.
From the executive suite to line managers to knowledge workers, every employee has a contribution to make to your company’s performance. Vista EPM helps them know what’s working and what’s not so they can take appropriate action in support of your continuous performance initiatives and strategic business goals.
Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) is about identifying and improving processes to make your business more efficient, more disciplined, and better able to adapt to changing conditions. However, BPM alone cannot provide the agility you need to get and stay competitive – you also need software that is adaptable in order to fully automate and accommodate your business processes as they change. Modern software that is built using a service-oriented approach or service-orientated architecture (SOA) provides the necessary flexibility required to put BPM to work, and for you to optimize your most important resources.
BPM Done Right - Most complete business processes start in one department and work their way through one or more different departments within the organization. Proper BPM requires the participation of business users in each department to help identify which processes are meaningful and which processes add no value to the output. In this respect, BPM transfers control to business users to build and model business rules at a business level. We believe that BPM is an integral part of a business and business software, and Epicor solutions include BPM in their very fabric.
More Than Workflow - To be effective, BPM needs to be more than just an automated workflow. Most business processes, no matter how much they lend themselves to automation, need to pause and proceed after some condition has been met or after human intervention. BPM is also about integrating various applications to provide the leanest, yet most inclusive business process possible. In conjunction with Epicor Service Connect, BPM provides real-time, event-driven workflow orchestrations, process automation, and application integration without the need for programming. In fact, BPM delivers a flexible tool in support of continuous performance initiatives like Lean and Six Sigma, by making software more agile for you to build your own business rules and then manage those rules at a business level.
Adaptable Business Software = Agile Business Operations - Although pre-packaged solutions will more than likely solve 80% of any businesses requirements out of the box, typically there is a 20% gap in what you need for your specific processes and what you get with a pre-packaged solution. In the past, this 20% gap was often tackled through software customization or changing your business processes to fit the software - not ideal. With modern service-oriented software, you can still expect to meet 80% of your requirements out of the box, but you can now look to shrink that 20% gap to less than 5% through adaptable BPM capabilities. Epicor brings you enterprise solutions which have been built from the ground up using SOA best practices. Combine Epicor’s SOA software solutions and Epicor Service Connect and you are able to easily remodel business processes to meet your needs, without the need to alter source code.
BPM + SOA = Orchestrated Solutions That Are Built To Change - BPM allows you to customize your business processes and SOA allows you to do so without modifying source code. With SOA, making the processes in your systems match your business is a matter of configuration, not customization. BPM and SOA support continuous process improvement initiatives to keep your business innovative, and efficient, and provide the agility necessary to respond to changing requirements quickly and easily.
Epicor Portal
Information to Drive Your Business - It is essential to have current enterprise data at your fingertips to make the decisions that drive your business to success. But sometimes it is difficult to get that data when you need, it if you have to wait for someone else to get it for you. Epicor Portal can help by providing the framework and tools that allow you to gather and share data without having to depend on others. With Epicor Portal, you can get the information you need, when you need it, from your enterprise system without having to wait in line.
Reduced IT Burden, Secure Data Access - Epicor Portal moves the function of gathering and publishing data out of the hands of IT and into the organization for easier collaboration and knowledge sharing. By leveraging Microsoft® SharePoint®for industry-leading portal infrastructure, Epicor Portal is able to provide a secure and collaborative portal environment that reaches across the enterprise. SharePoint offers rapid deployment, can be implemented with limited or no support, and presents a competitive price point – all critical features for midmarket companies. Epicor Portal provides a management console where roles and security settings are maintained. You determine exactly what your portal users can do by creating specific security settings for every Epicor Portal content consumer or group.
Ease of Use - Epicor Portal provides an easy to use data visualization tool which allows end users to intuitively create data views without any knowledge of the underlying database or querying language. Once these views have been created, they can be published as Microsoft SharePoint Web Parts for use by any qualified user. Data discovery and visualization within SharePoint empowers information workers to build and share key performance indicators and other business events in addition to performing ad-hoc online queries.
Improve Collaboration and Increase Productivity -Epicor Portal allows you to build specific content within a portal and make that content available for use throughout your organization. The ability to provide this level of information access will boost productivity and improve collaboration between your people, departments, and divisions. Additionally, Epicor Portal can provide secure enterprise data access to outside entities such as partners, suppliers, and customers for added visibility and business opportunities.
Unified View of Your Organization -Epicor Portal enables transparent and secure interaction with Epicor applications throughout the organization. Additionally, non-Epicor data sources can be incorporated into security and data discovery wizards to provide an integrated view of your business. Epicor Portal enables users to be more productive, encourages collaboration, and provides the means to make better business decisions.