Cloud-Based ERP Accelerates Productivity, Customer Responsiveness, Inventory Management and Sustainability
Food and beverage packaging, cereal and cookie boxes, and toy packages. The manufacturers of these everyday items depend on reliable partners to produce and deliver the specialized containers needed to ship and sell their products. One such company is 80-year-old Greenpaper, a leading provider of cardboard packaging solutions printed from 100% recycled materials on massive football-field-length machines.
Beginning in 2015, Greenpaper utilized Epicor Kinetic on-premises for enterprise resource planning tailored to the company’s unique business needs. Gustavo Carrillo, IT Manager at Greenpaper recalled, “We evaluated several ERP providers and Epicor Kinetic was the clear leader because of its flexibility to meet our industry specific requirements.”
In the ensuing years, Greenpaper realized significant benefits, including a dramatic drop in time needed for month-end close—from twenty-five days to a maximum of just two days. So, when management’s strategic plan included digital transformation and moving to the cloud as a key initiative, Carrillo felt confident using Epicor Kinetic for this strategic project.
More robust security, cost-savings, enhanced disaster recovery, business continuity planning, and the ability to stay updated with the latest Epicor Kinetic features were all drivers of this effort. Carrillo shared, “The cloud helped to offer significant improvements across all these objectives. Additionally, growth would no longer be constrained by having to add hardware; Epicor Kinetic deployed in the cloud helped to offer scalability and allowed us to maintain the customizations we required.”
To further smooth out details in the migration process, the experienced Epicor Professional Services team created a thorough project plan supported by proven implementation methodologies.
Sustainability is literally Greenpaper’s lifeblood; the company’s raw material is recycled paper.
Before deploying Epicor, understanding how much raw material tonnage was in stock was challenging—an employee would physically walk the warehouse each day. And because there was no way to manage inventory, the company was forced to maintain high levels of scrapped paper.
With Epicor Kinetic, better controls allowed Greenpaper to reduce inventory. More importantly, it helped to improve inventory management, enabling a more stringent classification of raw materials, yielding enhanced quality control, and driving a 6% increase in production line efficiency.
Furthermore, the move to the cloud significantly reduced Greenpaper’s energy consumption footprint. “Without the need for on-site servers and all the space and resources they demand, our environmental impact has noticeably decreased,” Carrillo highlighted.
Epicor Kinetic is also able on helping to provide Greenpaper with accurate delivery dates, which is a significant benefit. “In the past, we would give customers an estimated delivery date of two or three weeks. Now, with the visibility Epicor Kinetic provides, we can give customers a specific date, which is key to strengthening our service and our relationships,” explained Eduina Mancillas, Sales and Marketing Manager at Greenpaper.
“Even better, we are able to track and measure our on-time delivery and set targets for improvement,” Mancillas added.
Another benefit is the elimination of the lag time in invoicing. Previously, it took the Greenpaper team three days to generate an invoice. With Epicor, invoicing happens automatically at the time of shipment.
Moreover, traceability is critical to Greenpaper’s business. Customers and the government both require the company to demonstrate which raw materials are used for which products. Prior to Epicor Kinetic, the company utilized seven systems to try to track materials. “With seven systems, everyone had different data,” Carrillo admitted. “Now, we are all working from a single source of truth that shows us what raw material, which line, which machine, and all this accurate information saves us an incredible amount of time.”
With the excellent experience we had moving to the cloud with Epicor, now we are planning to shift other critical systems to the cloud as well.
Moving to the cloud also allowed Greenpaper to take advantage of APIs to integrate Epicor Kinetic with other business systems. For example, data from Epicor now flows to a government regulation portal helping to provide a supplier documentation, as well as to create quality certifications for Greenpaper products.
Additionally, because the cloud ensures the latest version of Epicor Kinetic is always available, Greenpaper is empowered to take advantage of up-to-the-minute features, such as country-specific functionality (CSF). Carrillo revealed, “Before the cloud, we needed to invest in developing and maintaining expensive interfaces to meet government requirements. Now, all the appropriate files are posted automatically. That is a tremendous amount of saved time and resources that we can redirect to value-added priorities.”
With resources liberated from more mundane tasks, Greenpaper is empowered to focus on higher-value efforts. One such project is adopting the Epicor Kinetic Financial Module to standardize and streamline accounting tasks to eliminate errors and further boost productivity.
In the past, we would give customers an estimated delivery date of two or three weeks. Now, with the visibility that Epicor Kinetic helps to provide, we can give customers a specific date, which is key to strengthening our service and our relationships. Even better, we can track and measure our on-time delivery and set targets for improvement.
The company is also using data from Epicor Kinetic to feed into other CRM and BI applications to advance business objectives. Carrillo observed, “Rather than spending the bulk of our time on transactional tasks, Epicor Kinetic enabled us to adopt a more strategic, analytical position, which delivers greater value to the business and to the customer.”
“And with the excellent experience we had moving to the cloud with Epicor, now we are planning to shift other critical systems to the cloud as well.”
