Strategic Process Review

Our strategic process review meticulously evaluates your business workflows and systems to identify opportunities for optimization and efficiency, ensuring alignment with your long-term goals.

SPR

Our Strategic Process Review℠ is our first step to any client's service project, be that an Epicor Kinetic implementation, migration to Kinetic from a previous Epicor version, development project to a client's Epicor system, or other consulting service.

Planning

With EpiCenter’s Strategic Process Review℠, you get an advanced internal planning tool that encompasses a 360-degree view of your organization, providing an objective and practical approach to understanding how your business operates.

Team

An SPR is conducted by a seasoned, Senior Consultant-level staff member, who has 20-30 years of manufacturing experience, along with a solid set of previous Epicor implementations under their belt.

Identifying Opportunities

After the initial analysis phase, usually done over a few days, the EpiCenter staff member produces a document that articulates their findings of a client's current state, as well as identifying opportunities where their Epicor system can help.

Roadmap

Ultimately, the SPR delivers a clear roadmap that guides you through your project. That guide illustrates how your business and Epicor system synthesize to resolve the reasons why you sought out this journey to begin with.

SPR Benefits

Business & System Expert Guidance

When we setup your EpiCenter implementation team, we select from our entire consulting group. We put together a team with the experience and expertise to best interface with your team and industry. The most experienced, senior member of the team is the one who does your SPR.

Not only will this person have formal education plus 20+ years in the field, but more importantly has proven to us that they have the business savvy and technical knowledge to masterfully evaluate your needs and work with you to identify the appropriate approach and scope for your project. They will weigh all of the variables – budget, timing, the strength of your team, and the needs of your company.

Clarify Company Goals

Once the information is all gathered – which is done in a series of interviews with your key ‘stakeholders’ – we will write an initial draft of the SPR. Then, the SPR is shared and reviewed by your implementation team for further clarification of your 'current state' and their ideas and comments regarding your 'future state'. This process effectively flushes out the most important goals of the new system, and the key business challenges you want to resolve.

Clear Path Forward

Typically, multiple revisions are made as we sort out and work with your staff to assess the unique operations of your business, along with how your system will handle them. Ultimately, this collaborative process culminates in a document we’ve agreed upon that provides the master plan, scope, and roadmap for your project. This document is the first major step of your implementation – determining scope and key deliverables.

ERP Investment Stewardship

Once we have agreed on the SPR, our implementation team builds the list of trainings and tasks needed to achieve what’s on the SPR. They use the empirical information gathered to determine the budget for each step of the project, and this Statement of Work (SOW) is presented to your project manager for signoff and approval. We then strictly work to this agreed upon set of tasks.

The glory of this is, later in the project, if ‘scope creep’ starts to happen, we can return to the SPR to find out why other items were not included. Most of the time, this is an excellent control system. There are times when top management may change their mind and decide later to add something back in the project, which is only done at their insistence and approval, typically as an additional SOW.

Objective Perspective

This process is a little bit like working with a new medical team. At first, we don’t know you or your organization, and we need to ask questions, test things, evaluate what is being presented, and come up with our own objective diagnosis of your company’s ‘health’ as it relates to business systems. There may be doctors, nurses, and techs with excellent experience, but they need to understand our team's background and how we can best compliment each other and work together.

You may have preconceived notions about why things may or may not be working well, but, honestly, there are times when our outside, objective perspective is both enlightening and/or validating.

It’s also a chance for you to evaluate how our team handles your situation. You will be very impressed with our SPR process and the professionalism that is utilized during its development. This is just a sample of the excellent care we will take with your project throughout.

Proper System Utilization

We want to stress that our point of view is typically that Epicor Kinetic has a broad set of appropriate tools to perform typical business tasks. Your company may have some non-standard ways of doing things, but if the standard, ‘out of the box’ Epicor process fits your needs, we will question why we can’t use these standard processes.

If, during our SPR, we determine that some of the standard Epicor functionality needs to be modified, we will suggest that and communicate accordingly.

Keep in mind that, throughout the rest of the process, we will be working with your staff to process many sample transactions to test whether the system, as we have configured it, will properly match your business needs.

In fact, your staff will be doing much of this testing, so be sure they are comfortable with how it’s working. This is why ‘go live’ is typically a ‘non-event’ for us. If all processes have been properly setup and thoroughly tested, there are no surprises when we go live.

Under Examination

What or who in your organization can add more value to your business vision?

Which customers and products are more profitable, and which aren't?

What changes will improve your operational perspective, inventory turnover, on-time scheduling, material management, etc?

What features of Epicor will most benefit your organization, and how should they be deployed?

How the organization can maximize efficiency from quote to cash.

Identification of best practices vs. current practices.

How does your use of the software impact the business and the people in your organization?

Present state vs. future state (and how to fulfill the organization's long-term business vision).