Mueller Custom Cut is located in Charlotte, NC, and specializes in manufacturing precise, high-quality gaskets, seals, and other diecut products primarily in the aerospace & defense and automotive fields. Mueller is a family-owned business that’s operated for more than 80 years. “If you need it we can make it,” ERP Manager Kevin Eliasson says. “If we don’t have the material, we’ll find it or we’ll find an alternative.”
Eliasson is an IT professional working in manufacturing for more than 37 years. Although he’s relatively new to Mueller, he’s an experienced Epicor user. “I’ve been working on Epicor for about 14 years,” he explains. “I was with a small manufacturing company based in Lancaster, South Carolina and they chose Epicor over competitors. I came to Mueller to drive the Epicor systems.”
Mueller transitioned from a system called Fourth Shift in 2014 to Epicor Kinetic, Eliasson says. He then started expanding Mueller’s use of the Epicor solutions they already owned. “They spent a lot of time creating spreadsheets, but I’m trying to drive home using that one source of truth,” he explains. Data capture is one of the biggest benefits of Epicor systems for Mueller’s success.
In 2019, Mueller moved from on-premise to Epicor Kinetic deployed in the cloud. “The advantage was accessibility,” Eliasson says. “We no longer have to manage the overhead of our databases. That’s all managed through Epicor and the transition went smoothly,” Eliasson notes. “We had a handful of super users, so they trained their departments. It took four to six weeks to transfer over—it was very quick.”
With the changes and challenges in 2020, being on the cloud was vital Eliasson says. “It went off without a hitch sending people home to work remotely. It was very simple.”
The advantage was accessibility. We no longer have to manage the overhead of our databases. That’s all managed through Epicor and the transition went smoothly. We had a handful of super users, so they trained their departments. It took four to six weeks to transfer over—it was very quick.
Epicor plays a critical role in capturing necessary data that Mueller needs to make the most efficient business decisions. “We have been able to capture the cost of goods and to figure out when the most profitable times for the machines to be running are,” Eliasson affirms. “You begin to see where dollars are being spent because the data is at your fingertips and is easy to get and manipulate.” He explains. “The whole idea is getting the company to become more data-driven. We’ve been able to do an excellent job of capturing data and it’s helping us make decisions properly.”
Adding the Epicor Advanced MES module to their platform gave Mueller the ability to attain more detailed and accurate data on how to improve production. “We added Epicor Advanced MES because we wanted to see where our standards of production weren’t measuring up,” Eliasson explains. “Epicor MES is a counter. It’s counting how many revolutions, how many stamps, how many rotations. It lets us know how active the machines are as opposed to the length of time a job took,” he says. ” We do several specialized jobs, and a job might take eight hours, but the machine only ran for an hour. We can see what the breakdown is between the machine running and the processes outside of that.”
This data creates the opportunity for improvements at processing stations. Eliasson adds, “You can start to look at whether you need more machines. And you can move the end processes around to utilize how the machine can work.”
“One thing I’m trying to cover with Epicor is to, again, drive home the practice of one source of truth. I know I’ve said that before,” Eliasson adds, “but I want to stop people from creating their own spreadsheets. I want them to utilize the system, so I narrowed down the group of report writers that have access to Epicor Data Analytics. That way we’re all using the same data.” He feels it’s crucial that they’re looking at the same data. “I want people to utilize the central data and then work out from there so we can make the best possible decisions to optimize business practices,” he says.
“After nearly 15 years, I would choose Epicor again,” Eliasson says. “It’s a great system with lots of flexibility and it’s easy to use. As long as you have Microsoft® Windows® end users, Epicor is almost seamless.”
Overall, Eliasson concludes, the biggest benefits are that Epicor helps drive processes—and streamlines them for your business.