Tomerlin Knowledge Center

Epicor® Core Modules

Epicor Sales Management contains 7 modules:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Case Management
• Commerce Connect
• Configure Price Quote
• Quote Management
• Demand Management
• Sales Order Automation
• Order Management

Some modules are actually integrated within the core or basic modules, for example, the Enhanced Quality Assurance module will appear embedded within the standard Quality Assurance module.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is first a marketing tool. You develop your campaigns in CRM and track them through the campaigns’ events activities, culminating with the leads generated from this lead generation process. With the lead/prospect in hand, CRM manages your entire sales process using Epicor tools, like, workflows and forecasting. The Sales Manager uses CRM to guide their sales staff through the quoting and sales strategies.

Your salespeople will use the Sales Workbench to manage the prospect-to-customer-to-quote-to-sale lifecycle. Once a lead/prospect is generated, they are assigned to sales staff based on territory and region. Once the lead/prospect is assigned, the salesperson is guided through the sales process using CRM task lists.

Case Management

Case Management provides call management from the first call to final resolution and follow-up. The Case Management module provides your organization with personalized, high-quality customer service. This comprehensive module enables your service team to manage their current caseload and respond quickly to customer issues.

This module includes a Case Workbench containing time-saving links to customer-focused activities like new quotes, orders, RMA requests, or service calls. It also consists of a workflow you leverage to standardize resolving customer cases. Use this functionality to dispatch field activities and give your field service representatives access to online knowledge such as existing customer field service calls, warranty information, and service contracts.

Commerce Connect

Commerce Connect satisfies an increasing demand from customers to be able to buy online. If you want this customer to keep coming back, you will need to develop your online website for selling your product. It will be imperative you provide these customers with an easy-to-use, fast, and attractive experience. Epicor’s® Commerce Connect will deliver this rich experience to your customers from the quote to fulfillment.

Configure Price Quote

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Epicor’s® Snap rules engine is a new feature that enables most of the new functionality. Your customers will use CPQ with confidence and speed. The new Epicor® tool offers both 2D and 3D viewing of your products. Enabling your customers to build their products online in real-time will shorten your sales cycle. Your quoting staff can also use CPQ for creating new or modified quotes for customers. This process will give your customer immediate pricing. After the quote is complete, your engineers will be able to generate drawings for sales staff proposals and CAD files for engineering. CPQ will integrate with software like, like SolidWorks, Autodesk, and PTC. After the quote has been accepted by your customer, CPQ will auto-generate all documents and information needed on the shopfloor, like, BOMs, cut sheets, and inventory status.

Quote Management

Quote Management through the Opportunity/Quote Entry utility. If the company requesting the quote is not in your database, the lead/prospect is created using Opportunity/Quote Entry. If the lead/prospect accepts your quote and issues you a purchase order, the lead/prospect will automatically be redefined as a customer. With your quote accepted by your new customer, you can “push” your quote information into your Sales Acknowledgement (sometimes called a Sales Order). If CRM is enabled, you will mark the quote as “won,” which automatically generates a sales order.

The typical quote will have header information and at least one or more quote line items that contain the parts and quantities requested to be quoted by the lead/prospect or customer. Once the quote line information is created, the quoter can start manufacturing each part. This information includes estimated material, subcontracted services, direct labor, and the burden required to make the part. These costs then can be marked up based on several options. A typical mark-up is based on your company’s gross profit margin goal. This gives the quoter and/or salesperson a benchmark to make a business/sale judgment. Without this pricing benchmark, you are quoting in the dark.

Demand Management

Demand Management is intended to manage your short and long-term contracts with your customers. The Demand Management module will convert the contractual customer demand into sales orders and demand forecasts.

With Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), you can manage your customers’ demand contracts bypassing information electronically both to and from your customer trading partners. Through the Customer Maintenance tool, you associate the customer’s “trading partner identification number” and define how inbound and outbound transactions are processed.

You manually use the Demand Entry or Demand Mass Review to review the demand lines and shipping schedule while evaluating their impact. After evaluation, you can reject and select the schedules for transactional processing. Once you have modified the schedule, you process the demand, which automatically creates firm sales order releases, unfirm releases, or demand forecasts.

Sales Order Automation

Sales order entry can be automated which does away with the very time-consuming task of manual entry, not to mention the cost associated with staff manually entering the information. Not only will sales orders be entered faster and cheaper but also more accurately. This tool is within Epicor® Enterprise  Content Management module. However, it is not core and must be purchased separately.

The process is as follows:

• Capture – Intelligent Data Capture (Epicor IDC) captures and extracts sales order data such as customer, order data, and line items.
• Validate – SOA performs a data lookup in Kinetic to confirm customer, quote, and other validations. Data exceptions are passed to a worker to resolve.
• Process – If all conditions are met, the order is created in Kinetic.

Order Management

Order Management through its Sales Order Entry utility, you can create and structure your sales order acknowledgments to accurately reflect your customer purchase orders: single release sales orders to complex, configured, kitted, multi-line, multi-release orders. When necessary, you can always change all aspects of the sales order, designate a line item as make-direct or buy-direct, allocate inventory, drop-ship, and using the Order/Job Wizard, automatically create jobs from the order’s detail lines.

When using the price and discount functionality, you can apply your price breaks across your product lines or individual price breaks to specific customers. You can create a sales kit for a part containing any related child parts with the Sales Kit function.