Omega Plastics needed a reliable way to gather detailed, project-specific reporting and operations information, without the resources of a large internal IT staff. Implementing Epicor Kinetic not only centralized operational functions but also dramatically increased the speed of generating updatable project dashboards.
Omega Plastics Inc. is a leader in the development and manufacture of low-cavitation injection molds, molded products, and assemblies. The company's client list includes Fortune 100 companies and global suppliers representing the medical, automotive, aerospace, and consumer packaging marketplace.
"We specialize in the fast, flexible, collaborative turnaround of manufacturing solutions that meet stringent timelines and tight tolerance manufacturing requirements," said Mike Pavlica, vice president of operations and finance for Omega Plastics. "We focus our efforts on providing an exceptional client experience from product development, to bridge-to-production, to low-cavitation production, and assembly services. As a result, we've grown tremendously, over 25 percent in 2016, with double-digit revenue increases projected again in 2017."
Founded in 1984, much of this significant growth was triggered by ongoing investment in state-of-the-art machining and fulfillment technologies. Among these solutions was the implementation of the Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in 2013 and its subsequent update during an aggressive four-month installation process in early 2017. Working jointly with the professional services team at Epicor, this effort allowed Omega to carefully evaluate the value and usability of the company's entire database, which was loaded directly and securely to the Epicor website via an encrypted cloud connection.
"The online tools Epicor had available helped us make good decisions on what to keep and remove," explained Pavlica. "As a result, we were able to eliminate numerous dashboards, customizations, and business process management (BPM) that were either redundant or not used at all. This significantly lowered the costs and time associated with the upgrade by enabling us to keep only what we really needed. We also were able to quickly perform three separate tests prior to 'go live' to ensure everything was right the moment our upgrade went live."
Designed as a standardized, scalable method for mining data and seamlessly centralizing operational functions, the newly updated Epicor ERP (now known as Kinetic) system was developed to address real-world scenarios in a global economy. This offers even quicker performance and simplicity with the ability to integrate with new technologies like big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, social, and 3D design automation. It also leverages new mobile frameworks that provide anytime, anywhere information access to virtually any mobile device via the cloud.
"With the increased pace of our business due to strong growth in the medical device market, yet not having the luxury of a large internal IT staff, we decided that partnering with the professional services team at Epicor would give us the best ROI," said Pavlica. "This allowed Omega's operations team to maintain focus on client deliveries while back-end systems improvement increased throughput and scalability, helping to support our growth without significant investments in overhead."
According to Pavlica, after the latest upgrade, the speed of generating complex customer project update dashboards increased fivefold—allowing Omega to view status and timeline projections twice daily. The update also cut the system overhead by 90 percent by replacing multiple customized dashboards, BPMs, and reports with standardized Epicor functionality and templates that needed only small modifications. Other improvements included the implementation of a new interface that was easily and quickly customized to accommodate specific user needs and live feeds providing business activity updates like up-to-the-minute shipping information through Epicor Social business information feeds.
"Epicor played a major role in helping our team to learn and take advantage of the new functionality in the latest version of Epicor ERP [Kinetic]," recalled Pavlica. "The web-based educational videos allowed us to assign training via email and monitor each person's progress. By completing online training in advance of our target launch date, our team transitioned easily to the new interface because they already knew what to expect—which meant little to no downtime when we went live."
"Going forward, we plan to stay current by continually upgrading our system with the latest Epicor ERP [Kinetic] releases," Pavlica concluded. "There's so much more we want to do with Epicor's help. This includes using machine feedback to increase the visibility of shop floor activities such as the immediate assessment of cycles and OEE. We believe the ability to increase efficiencies, productivity, and support sound business decisions through knowledge-based tools like these are essential for our ongoing growth."
