Sheló NABEL, based in Jalisco, Mexico, is a fast-growing company in consumer goods of personal care products and cosmetics. They have a presence in US and Mexico through more than 500,000 affiliates, with ambitious plans to expand their presence at international level.
Sheló NABEL has previously implemented an ERP system, designed to help them manage their marketing network, but the company knew that they needed to focus on strengthening their plant operations and supply chain to support their ambitious growth objectives. As a result, they decided to implement a new ERP system that had strong plant operation capabilities and was hosted in the cloud. This will allow them to focus on building their resources on operations, while letting the vendor worry about operating the servers, implementing updates, and managing security. Sheló NABEL also wanted the solution to be quick to implement. After evaluating various solutions, they selected Epicor Kinetic, a leading cloud ERP platform since it was the only solution that met all their criteria.
Sheló NABEL started the Epicor Kinetic implementation in September 2018 and went live within 4 months in January 2019. The feedback from all stakeholders on the functional capabilities and the ease of use of the system was extremely positive. Choosing to build upon that success, they decided to replace their corporate system with Epicor Kinetic as well, going live in January 2021.
By choosing Epicor Kinetic, Sheló NABEL was able to significantly reduce the upfront investment that is typically needed for a new ERP system. Sheló NABEL selected Epicor Kinetic deployed in the cloud so they did not need to invest in purchasing new servers, middleware or security software or establishing a site to operate the servers. Epicor Kinetic does not demand much investment in connectivity or bandwidth resources either with 25 concurrent users, Sheló NABEL experienced a very good response time from their 50MB internet bandwidth. In addition, like any cloud solution, Epicor Kinetic gets automatically upgraded when a new update is available, saving money that would otherwise be spent on paying external consultants to support upgrades. The Restful APIs in Epicor Kinetic made it very easy and cost effective for Sheló NABEL to integrate their ERP solution. As a mid-sized business, all these cost savings provided a significant advantage to Sheló NABEL in cash management, while providing them with a best-in-class ERP system.
With Epicor Kinetic deployed in the cloud, Sheló NABEL is able to immediately access and take advantages of new product features as they become available in the new updates. In addition, once a minor product bug is reported to the support organization, most software companies tend to fix them in the next update of their software. As a cloud customer who is always current on the latest update, Sheló NABEL sees far fewer product bugs now, than in the past when they were running older versions in an on-premises environment. “Implementing Epicor Kinetic in the cloud was the best decision we made”, said Jose Manuel Ibarra, Operations Manager, Sheló NABEL.
The end users also don’t have to deal with downtime from the updates. When they arrive at work on Monday, the update has already taken place over the weekend.
With Epicor Kinetic, we not only have a very rich solution for both plant operations and corporate, but we also have the backing of an entire Epicor cloud infrastructure, which makes us very comfortable about the availability and security of our cloud ERP system. It also allows us to be automatically current on the latest software updates without needing to plan and spend our budgets on upgrades every year.
When they start their Epicor application, it automatically starts with the new update. Sheló NABEL found Epicor Kinetic to be very rich in functionality for their business process needs, as well as designed to support global regulations and standards. As a result, their policy is to use, as much as possible, the Epicor Kinetic capabilities out-of-the-box as opposed to customizing the solution. This has made their update process very straight forward. They know the calendar of updates in advance and can easily validate if the handful of their customizations are continuing to work once the update has been applied.
