At its annual Insights conference, Epicor laid out its vision for a connected Data Supply Chain. Data-driven decision-making is the best way for organisations to make the right decisions at the right time for their business. Epicor intends to provide firms with the right information at the right time and with the right tools to make the best decisions they can. The Data Supply Chain helps automate the data flows across the supply chain, connecting partners and customers, and uses AI to provide insights and organisation’s needs.
Epicor CEO Steve Murphy announced, “To be successful in today’s marketplace, Makers, Movers, and Sellers must make data-driven decisions faster and with greater accuracy. It’s all about the right insights, in the right place, at the right time. Epicor is delivering the digital foundation to help give our customers an insight advantage, supported by our deep industry expertise, powerful data analytics, and emerging AI capabilities that will help pave the road to a more resilient and predictable global supply chain.”
Data is everywhere within an organisation. The challenge is collating that data into a single location and then applying analytics to surface the insights organisations need. The recent Epicor Industry Insights Report highlighted that 80% of respondents want to leverage the latest technology to achieve this. 70% want to turn to their ERP provider, the technology at the heart of their business, to provide these tools rather than find another supplier.
This is a challenge that Epicor meets using its Industry ERP Cloud platforms to provide data in context for organisations across the sectors it operates in, manufacturing, distribution, retail, building supply, and automotive aftermarkets. During the Insights conference, Epicor demonstrated several existing and new tools customers can use to achieve this.
Epicor Grow
In March 2022, Epicor acquired Grow, a no-code full-stack business intelligence platform. Now rebadged as Epicor Grow, it combines data integration, warehousing, and visualization into a single solution. Users can quickly build visualisations, connecting data sources and surface insights to help make decision-making faster.
EVA gets ChatGPT
Epicor has now integrated the Epicor Virtual Agent (EVA) with ChatGPT from OpenAI. EVA is already embedded within Epicor Kinetic and Prophet 21, and this extension to its functionality will make insights more accessible to users. ChatGPT will leverage data from both within and outside of Epicor to deliver answers to natural language questions that take advantage of the predictive analytics that Epicor already has.
With its voice recognition technology, this could prove ground-breaking as leaders merely need to ask the right question to surface the insights and potential actions. While there are few details on the Epicor site about the capabilities, it will be interesting to see it in action. Could it answer questions such as:
- Why is revenue in Texas greater than in California?
- What inefficiencies exist in production line B?
ChatGPT is a new technology, it is impressive, but its boundaries and intelligence are still being explored.
Supplier Integration
The Epicor integration Cloud leverages the Jitterbit API integration to connect data sources, both internal and external, to power applications such as Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Grow. Epicor customers can seamlessly exchange data with trading partners for instant visibility into order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes. It will provide information about real-time inventory levels and pricing data within a supplier community. Then, using automatically generated supplier performance scores, organisations can select the best vendor to meet a given requirement’s quality, delivery, and timing needs.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
While there appears to be no major new product announcement from Insights, Epicor is bringing together elements of its portfolio to create something of greater use to its customers.
Epicor Chief Product Officer Vaibhav Vohra commented, “This is an era in which cloud computing, business intelligence, and AI can be applied at scale to transform the way we solve some of our biggest challenges. We’re empowering our customers’ workforces – from the top floor to the shop floor – to tap into a world of innovative possibilities for how workstreams and collaboration across the essential industries get done.”
The combination of low-code, generative AI, Analytics and integration capabilities offers huge potential for Epicor customers. Discovering how customers explore and combine these technologies to improve their organisations over the next few months will be interesting.
