How to Reduce Downtime with Epicor ERP

Waste: It’s the number one nemesis of manufacturers and distributors. Whether it’s excess inventory and raw material, hours poured into mundane tasks or money lost to botched projects, every extra cent or minute wasted causes your business to lose out on customers and revenue. We’ve covered the importance of lean manufacturing a lot on our blog, but today we focus specifically on downtime and explore the Epicor ERP tools that help businesses stay up and running.

Automate Production Monitoring

You can’t reduce downtime if you don’t know where it occurs. Automatic trackers are a must for monitoring every cycle and every machine for downtime and runtime. The Epicor Manufacturing Execution System (MES) automates production monitoring with trackers that detect downtime in real time, sending alerts to the factory floor that show the exact location of the problem.

Cost reporting for scrap and machine downtime also gives businesses a crucial financial perspective that promotes smarter decision making. Automated production monitoring is integral to improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and plant productivity as well as decreasing machine downtime.

Motivate Employees

If employees aren’t inspired to do their best, they could let important processes fall through the cracks, taking a major hit on production schedules. Furthermore, workers on the production lines possess a crucial perspective on machine performance and manufacturing procedures that often goes unnoticed.

Regular communication between managers and employees will make employees feel valued, boosting morale and productivity. Supervisors can explain the correlation between downtime and business profits and encourage production line workers to voice their concerns. These conversations provide employees with a greater understanding of their role while keying supervisors in on problems in the production line that they may not have seen. For further motivation, set daily and quarterly goals for reducing downtime and offer incentives to employees who accomplish these tasks.

Epicor ERP includes features that foster effective communication. By offering real-time data, ERP enables your business to not only achieve greater accuracy and efficiency but also collaborate effortlessly. Additionally, Epicor Social Enterprise (ESE) uses common social platform tools such as instant notifications, hashtags and sharing to make collaboration easy. Any updates in the product lifecycle can be shared among production managers and team members to ensure operations are running smoothly and clients are getting exactly what they paid for. Collaboration creates a more efficient, motivated team that steers companies toward success.

Perform Regular Maintenance

Failure to perform regular maintenance on shop floor machinery puts your business at risk. An unexpected jam or breakdown can strike a major blow to downtime outcomes and expenses. Regular maintenance reduces machinery malfunctions, keeps machines operating for a long time and lets you know when it’s time to make an upgrade.

Epicor MES offers machine and tool preventative maintenance (PM) and automated alarms and notices for PM to help operators stay on top of their machines’ performance. Epicor helps you keep up with maintenance schedules, equipment performance and statistical quality, ensuring your production lines operate efficiently.  

Wrap Up

Epicor ERP includes the production management and collaboration functionality to move processes along without interruption. But if your Epicor instance is helping you keep operations up and running, what’s keeping your ERP up and running? 

A certified Epicor partner, Datix has proven itself an expert in leveraging ERP to reduce downtime and increase revenue throughout its 20 years as an enterprise software solutions leader. After we’ve helped clients implement their software, we stay on board to manage your solution and assist with future projects. Our comprehensive error handling and continuous improvements allow your manufacturing or distribution processes to progress smoothly. Plus, with our EverSafe! backup and disaster recovery solution, our consultants protect cloud and on-site software from detrimental downtime. 

To learn more about how Epicor ERP can cut down on downtime, contact our experienced consultants today!

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