Industrial machinery (IM) and equipment manufacturers face complex supply chain and business challenges. The industry trends are towards a reduction in operating costs, increased use of low cost markets for production, an increased focus on services and demand for increasingly customized products.

In order to comply with strong economic and competitive pressures, IM manufacturers need to tightly control operating costs by rationalizing inventory and improving collaboration with suppliers.

This means that, as an IM organisation, you need to run agile and cost-efficient operations, perhaps on a global basis, to smoothly accommodate fluctuating demand and handle engineering order changes.

You may be finding that the revenues associated with the maintenance, replacement and upgrade of existing installed products represent a more important part of your business, creating a need for an effective product lifecycle and customer relationship management solution capable of optimizing customer service and support on a global or regional basis. To fulfill these needs you require collaboration and visibility across all aspects of the business and with all value-chain members.

The Epicor | iScala Industrial Machinery solution is a fully integrated package where each process seamlessly interfaces with other processes.  This supports the deployment of a standard multilingual and multicurrency system throughout your organisation; supporting your efforts to operate in low cost regions of the world with a cost effective, fully integrated ERP solution.

Process summary:
The graphic above illustrates that the CRM process is an integral part of other IM business processes, ensuring that the relationship with your customers is always paramount, whether in the process of taking Sales Orders or managing service agreements with them.  The Sales Order Management process may seamlessly refer to existing contractual agreements you may have with your clients, or support you in formalizing those agreements and ensuring that information on these agreements is made available to whoever is dealing with your client at any time.

Often with IM organisations (particularly where the industrial machinery being produced is quite large) the delivery of a solution to a customer involves individual projects.  The integrated Epicor| iScala Project Management solution optimizes the management of each project, from the point of taking the sales order, through the manufacturing process, the installation of the machinery at the client site, the education of your own or your customer’s staff regarding operation of the equipment, and the ongoing provision of service to your customers.  This may take the form of your customer contacting your iScala driven Helpdesk for support.  Of course, should your customer require a service engineer, the Help desk will have all information regarding warranties, guarantees and other contractual information to hand in order to ensure your customers receives the level of service they are entitled to.

In many IM organisations the machine or ancillary equipment is rented out to customers, perhaps with an option to buy at the end of the rental period.  Rental often occurs when, for example, the production and provision of industrial machinery is a second line of business supporting a primary line.  An example of this might be the sale or rental of specialised packaging machinery to customers where the primary line is the packaging material itself.  Clearly there is a cost benefit in standardising the business processes of all lines of business on one integrated solution such as iScala. 

Of course, regardless of whether the machinery is rented or sold, you may have a contractual agreement to ensure that the equipment performs optimally at all times.  This means that the industrial machinery needs to be maintained at predefined and agreed intervals to prevent downtime.