| | July 201519CIOReviewEpec Leading the Way for US Manufacturing With Cloud-based TechnologyAt Epec Engineered Technologies, we design and manufacture custom, build to print products, for all sectors of the electronics industry. We are a leading edge manufacture of electronics that are used in medical devices, test and measurement equipment, military and aerospace electronics, portable and consumer electronics, industrial applications, and the automotive and transportation industry. We are constantly incorporating the newest technologies into our products, but we don't stop there. As a technology based company, we strive on using the latest technologies into all aspects of our business, including the use of cloud-based data utilized by our offices across the world.Let's take a walk down memory lane to 2007; back then we were using an on-site ERP system. We were also in the process of expanding our supply chain into Asia, contracting with manufacturers there to produce our engineered and customized components. But our hosted ERP system was making it difficult to exchange data with our partners. This legacy ERP system was time-consuming to customize, often it required costly workarounds and spreadsheets for exchanging data, and could not integrate well with third-party systems, thus preventing Epec from sending and receiving real-time data on orders and production status. It was also difficult to create the custom forms, workflows, dashboards and reports that we needed in order to run our business.After evalu-ating several op-tions we selected NetSuite. Today, all of Epec's 120 employees, from our New Bedford, MA head-quarters to offices in Colorado, Florida, the U.K. and China, all use NetSuite's standardized cloud platform.That's not all. We are also utilizing two custom-built configure-price-quote (CPQ) tools from Selectica that are natively integrated with NetSuite. InstantPCBQuote, our online quote and ordering tool that lets customers configure and order their own printed circuit boards and flex circuits built to their specifications on Epec's secure website. The second tool is used internally by Epec's customer service team for quoting PCB's. Our internal customer service tool has almost doubled the number of customer quotes we can produce per day, from 40 to 75, without the need to hire more staff. This in-house CPQ tool eliminates many of the time-consuming manual steps in quote generation.Once we mastered using Netsuite as an ERP and CRM system, we began looking at how we could use the system to go paperless. By integrating another cloud based tool, Box.com, Epec was able to take 80 percent of process and make them paperless. Not only did it save money and tree's, it also allowed us to be more effective as a business as we could use the functionality to store the document copy in the record that is was associated with, which reduced any need to go searching for something. Not only was this helpful in terms of providing our customers with faster customer service, it also reduced audit times by over 50 percent as all of the documents associated with a transaction were in one place.Lastly, we have just rolled out a By Ed McMahon, CEO, Epec Engineered TechnologiesEd McMahonCXO Insight
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