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Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Steve Murphy is the CEO of Epicor , a global leader providing flexible, industry-specific software designed around its customers' needs. You’re working on the shop floor of a propeller shaft factory and need information in a hurry. What was the percentage change in the weekly defect rate? Has a key component supplier been on time to deliver parts? How often is the production line going down? It’s hard to course-correct based on a hunch.

If you are a shop floor manager and don’t have answers to these and other key questions at your fingertips, you’re left to operate on guesswork. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software—particularly when it’s tailor-made for manufacturing—has all the information a shop floor manager should need. But tapping into the technology to glean insights is a lot harder than it ought to be.



Over the years, as the market for ERP has grown, the system has been managed by an elite cadre of administrators entrusted with access privileges to retrieve data or change workflows within the system. That’s how IT works. The job of these system experts has been to safeguard data, monitor workflows and speak in the arcane language of complex enterprise software, sharing information on an as-needed basis.

Unfortunately, it has also slowed down the ERP information retrieval process, essentially leaving the rest of us dependent on the kindness of strangers. Instead of the technology adapting to the.

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