The-plastics-sector-continues-to-be-a-growing-industry-full-of-innovation

Rubber and Plastics continues to be a growing industry

The rubber and plastics sector continues to be a growing industry full of innovation and forward-thinking people. With Industry 4.0 now becoming mainstream. The benefits of plastic are undeniable.The material is inexpensive, lightweight, and easy to make. Those qualities have led to a boom in the production of plastics over the past half century, and this trend will carry on as plastic production continues to increase over the next decade.

Improve Operational Visibility

Through integrated ERP/MES technology, your business removes redundant processes and improves accuracy of information to provide better customer service and centralized operational management.

Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics is a completely integrated solution for managing your business. From marketing and sales through production and planning, sourcing, procurement, customer service and finance, Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics offers flexibility in deployment.

Plastic
Plastic

Improve Quality and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Making quality parts is a top goal of any manufacturer in the plastics and rubber industry—it can both reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. Statistical process control (SPC) and statistical quality control (SQC) with Epicor Mattec MES use real-time, automatic data to help you respond to production conditions before making bad parts. SPC and SQC with factual data enable consistent results without constant oversight.

With Epicor, statistical analysis is easy and accessible because it’s automated and visual. Epicor virtually eliminates the need for a statistician—or even advanced mathematics training— to put SPC and SQC to work for your company. SPC and SQC do the work in the background and serve up visually intuitive graphs and charts that are designed for fast, easy understanding by operators and engineers alike—complete, accurate, and automated.

Project success is critical to bottom-line profitability, yet many businesses struggle with projects running behind schedule or over budget. The Epicor project management software solution enables intricate, multilevel phases as well as strict project costing and billing. Epicor project management software utilizes detailed estimation, planning, scheduling, costing, and supply chain logistics—offering you complete control and analysis of any project.

Enable-Mold-and-Tooling-Profitability

Enable Mold and
Tooling Profitability

 

Epicor Project Management is easily deployed to manage the design, prototype, and manufacture of new mold and other projects. Complete project analysis—including revenue recognition—give long-running projects new visibility.

Many manufacturers find that partnering with a select group of customers is more profitable. To maintain highly developed relationships, you need strong communication coupled with agility and flexibility. Epicor helps you respond quickly to changes in customer demand and supply value-added services.

Epicor for Rubber and Plastics offers a suite of functionality designed to assist your organization in putting the demands of your customer first. With embedded customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, we ensure that all customer communication is fluid throughout the organization. This provides complete workflow for each cost-based estimate with customer sign-off as a stage of the initial design or estimate—closing the loop with customer service, which logs each customer inquiry and provides comprehensive escalation workflow when needed.

Epicor Mattec MES empowers plastics and rubber parts and goods manufacturers with real-time performance data and the ability to eliminate inaccurate and time-consuming manual data collection.

Epicor Mattec MES enables complex capabilities specifically for plastic and rubber products operations—such as active cavity tracking and family molding— to help you run your business more efficiently.

Maximize-Equipment-Effectiveness

Maximize Equipment
Effectiveness

Real-time production and process data provides instant, accurate insight on equipment status, tool effectiveness, and conditions, so you can achieve informed lights out manufacturing. The “production pulse” paves the way for accurate, consistent performance metrics so the entire team can focus on getting better—OEE, run rates, scrap, yield, and much more. It’s all delivered in a way that makes sense for everyone—from the shop floor to the top floor—with operator depth and dimension to help you pinpoint and tackle chronic loss. Better performance with Epicor Mattec MES helps you boost quality, customer service, and competitiveness. Epicor Mattec MES supports digital and analog machine signals directly from machines or sensors or via PLC or OPC-compliant PLC.

Rubber-Plastic

Products have become increasingly more complex. In part,
this is due to options that consumers are looking for in the
marketplace. In addition, a new level of innovation is being
leveraged to engineer modern products. Epicor ERP offers
capabilities for managing complex products. In particular,
within a single engineered product, users can not only
retain the bill of material (BOM) and bill of operation (BOO),
but there are also capabilities to manage multiple levels of
assemblies. Doing this within a single engineering structure
allows engineers to visually confirm all components—both
manufactured and purchased. It also allows for accurate
scheduling and costing multilevel assemblies.

Strict requirements for product and material traceability have
long been a requirement of highly regulated industries such
as aerospace and defense, medical device, and automotive.
However, many other industries today are requiring strong
process control with lot and serial controlled inventories
throughout. Epicor provides a robust offering that tracks
materials as well as tooling, finished, and semi-finished
products throughout the entire production process.

Long-term customer relationships are the bread and butter
of this industry. Maintaining supplier status is based on
measurements of not only cost and quality, but also delivery
performance. For many manufacturers, production visibility—
particularly the schedule of the plant—has outgrown the
traditional whiteboard. It now encompasses more expansive
requirements such as “what-if” scenarios, multi-resource
constraints, and even capability-based scheduling—whether
employee skill set or machine capability.

On top of the other challenges facing manufacturers of rubber
and plastics products, a new set of governmental and industry-mandated regulations are stressing organizations. These requirements demand tight control of manufacturing process and traceability along with strict business practices. From SOX to IATF/ISO/AS/TS/QS standards, today’s manufacturers are faced with challenges that eat at the bottom line of their profits. The Epicor robust infrastructure—coupled with its comprehensive quality suite—offers a comprehensive approach to automating the compliance process.

More than ever, manufacturers are looking up and down their supply chains to eliminate waste and improve bottom line results. Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics promotes tighter collaboration throughout the supply chain while analyzing the same metrics that you are measured on—including supplier shipping performance or quality ratings. Looking for new efficiencies and measurements of supplier performance? Look to automated processes for requesting RFQs or for sending change orders through electronic queues on supplier portals or more directly through EDI.

In our increasingly digital world, your ability to survive, compete, and grow depends on how your business leverages the latest best-practice technology. Manual, disconnected processes simply cannot keep pace. Business leaders are increasingly choosing cloud computing for the bulk of their IT operations—including the ERP software they use to manage inventory and product manufacturing. Cloud has become the platform of choice, underpinning a variety of growth initiatives such as mobility, analytics, robotics, eCommerce, digitization, IoT, and more. Worldwide, more companies are leveraging the cloud for ERP deployments to benefit from its compelling economics, liberate IT resources, and more effectively pursue innovative growth strategies. Epicor ERP in the cloud is uniquely fit for your industry, value-driven, cost-effective, and powered by the best enterprise-grade, global cloud platform—Microsoft Azure.

Many manufacturers are getting back to basics and looking
to reduce waste with stronger cost control and management
of key cost elements. Through efficient management of the
buying process, today’s businesses are using just-in-time
(JIT) techniques for procurement of material. Additionally,
buyers are looking for new ways to drive down margins with
suppliers. Good forecasting and demand requirements provide
better buying power. Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics
includes inventory control alongside material requirements
planning (MRP) and purchase suggestions capabilities to
provide time-phased material control and material delivery just
in time. Critical to the process are strong indicators of cost and
post-production cost analysis. Each production run
is analyzed to determine total cost broken out by material
cost, material burden cost, labor cost, subcontract cost,
and burden cost. Based on profitability and run analysis,
production management can then determine if production
planning estimates need adjustment for quoting and rerun
the next time

Innovative manufacturers who deploy lean methodologies
business-wide reap huge benefits in terms of customer
satisfaction and overall business performance. For manufacturers looking to reduce wasted processes from the
office to plant floor, integrated systems can help streamline
business processes. Additionally, support for cell-based
strategies help boost key customer requirements. Deploying
demand/pull systems that are based on replenishment
principals further improves JIT material and component
efficiencies. Epicor software contains embedded lean activity
metrics and Kanban functionality—i.e. signal to manufacture
or move product—that offers the functionality required to
manage several types of electronic signals for Kanban control.

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows manufacturers to connect their systems, sensors, machines, and people like never before. Epicor IoT leverages the power of Microsoft Azure software IoT Hub with the context and in-depth data of Epicor ERP. With Epicor IoT, you get even more intelligent insight into the operations and day-to-day activities of your enterprise.

With competitive pressures driving many manufacturers to expand globally, many manufacturers find themselves suddenly managing multiple sites disparately. Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics has comprehensive multisite capabilities coupled with global presence to help meet your company’s requirements for local support. Competing globally and domestically—bridging geographic and strategic diversity and eliminating supply chain inefficiencies—can be accomplished with the technologies to streamline intracompany and intercompany processes and communicate quickly and accurately. Synchronization of complex relationships that determine supply, demand, and fulfillment is the means to reaching new, industry-leading levels of business performance. Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics can help you achieve maximum efficiencies across your globally extended enterprise.

Epicor empowers your workforce with a consistent user experience at their desk or from their mobile device— wherever employees are. Epicor Kinetic UI was designed to offer a modern look and feel and enable developers to create applications that work across any device.

Epicor Virtual Agent (EVA) is intelligence personified for Epicor systems across industries. Users will be empowered by the context-aware natural language processing (NLP) of EVA. With EVA, you interact naturally with your ERP system. It’s as easy as just talking or typing to a colleague. This makes the breadth and depth of the industry-specific functionality and information available inside the system directly accessible to a larger audience, boosting productivity and efficiency, and giving your company an improved return on ERP investment. But that is just one aspect of EVA – more than just a chat, EVA returns richly formatted information cards with buttons for suggested next actions. As a result, your employees can have the answers right when they have the question regardless of location or device, you can get more done with the employees you have, and you can attract the next generation of employees with modern technology. Developed using AI services from Microsoft Azure, EVA can be added to all sizes and types of Epicor ERP implementations—on premises as well as in the cloud. This helps ensure customers of any size, including small and medium-sized companies, can take advantage of innovative technologies that will help them grow their businesses.

Epicor has more than 45 years of experience delivering industry-focused, world-class solutions and ongoing customer care and service to more than 20,000 customer installations. We are a true global solutions partner with support offices all over the world. The key vehicle that transforms Epicor software for Rubber and Plastics into a successful business solution is our Signature Implementation Methodology. Epicor delivers among the most cost effective and efficient techniques to plan, design, validate, and deploy your Epicor solution. Staffed with direct employees around the globe who are properly trained and equipped with world-class implementation tools, Epicor follows our proven five-stage Signature Methodology designed specifically around Epicor software and our customers. The end
result is designed to be an on-time, on-budget implementation of your Epicor solution that allows your company to quickly begin using Epicor for Rubber and Plastics in day-to-day operations—helping you time and money by providing broad functionality at a lower total cost of ownership.