Building Unified Intelligence for SMBs: The Foundation for CX with Epicor – Six Five Media Virtual Webcast

The future of business isn’t just about data; it’s about making that data actionable for everyone, not just data scientists. 🧑‍🔬

The Futurum Group’s Research Director Keith Kirkpatrick hosts John Carrico, VP of Product Management at Epicor, for a discussion on how Epicor’s Grow Data Platform is improving customer experiences (CX) for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in the manufacturing, distribution sectors, and beyond.

Key takeaways include:

🔹From ERP to Ecosystem: Epicor’s Grow Data Platform goes beyond traditional ERP, connecting data from CRM, e-commerce, supply chain, and more, for a truly holistic view of operations.

🔹AI-Powered Accessibility: Imagine AI-driven insights without needing a data science team. Epicor is delivering that with built-in AI that simplifies complex analysis, trend prediction, and customer personalization.

🔹Empowering the Entire Workforce: No more data silos! Epicor is breaking down barriers with unlimited user access and no-code tools, enabling everyone to tap into data-driven decision-making.

🔹Private Data Lakes for the SMBs: Epicor is bringing the power of big data to small and mid-sized businesses with private data lakes that offer enterprise-level security and scalability without the enterprise-level price tag.

Learn more at Epicor, Unveiling the Power of Unified Data: A Deep Dive into Epicor’s Grow Data Platform, and Leveraging Epicor’s Grow Data Platform for Better Insights and Improved CX.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Hi, I’m Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director with the Futurum Group and welcome to the Six Five Media Virtual Webcast. Today I’ll be speaking with John Carrico, VP of Product Management at Epicor, to discuss how Epicor’s Grow Data platform brings enterprise level intelligence within reach in manufacturing, distribution and beyond. Now today’s discussion will cover why a private data lake is essential for unifying structured and unstructured data, how businesses are solving key pain points with AI driven insights, and why having access to an entire data ecosystem, not just ERP, is a game changer. Most importantly, we’ll discuss how organizations can move beyond their fragmented systems to make faster and smarter decisions that actually fuel business performance and lay the foundation for exceptional CX. So welcome John. Great to have you here today.

John Carrico: Thanks Keith. Great to be here.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Great. So John, why don’t we start out, can you just give us a little background on who Epicor is and what Epicor’s core data platform is?

John Carrico: Sure, thanks for the question Keith. Epicor is a global provider of industry specific enterprise software built for the essential businesses that make, move and sell things that we all rely on every day. Now we serve industries such as manufacturing, distribution, retail, building, supply and automotive. These verticals are where operational efficiency and deep industry expertise make all the difference. Now our customers range from small and midsize businesses to large enterprises, but they all want the same thing. Solutions that fit their industry, connect their systems and help make them smarter AI assisted decisions. So instead of forcing businesses into a one size fits all ERP, Epicor builds configurable, connected, low code and no code solutions that businesses can adapt to how they actually work. Whether it’s helping a distributor streamline their supply chain or giving a manufacturer real time production insights. So with little no coding required, IT teams don’t have to spend all their time on customizations and upkeep and non technical users can get more done on their own without waiting for or needing IT support. That means businesses can easily integrate their systems and applications, automate workflows, and analyze data without the complexity or high cost of traditional IT solutions.

Now in that same vein Keith, the Grow Data platform is a full stack AI powered, no code data platform designed to help businesses bring together data from across their entire ecosystem, not just the ERP. Now when we say full stack we mean that all the essential components, whether it’s data storage, transformation, integration, AI powered analytics and visualization, are provided as part of a comprehensive package from Epicor. So unlike other solutions that require businesses to piece together tools from multiple vendors, often huge, expensive solutions. Grow Data platform delivers an out of the box experience with everything needed to ingest, process, analyze and act on data in one unified system. That means less complexity, fewer integration headaches and a faster path to value. While customers will have the option to extend the platform with third party add ons, they don’t really need to rely on multiple vendors to get up and running. They get an enterprise grade AI and data capable solution in a single accessible, capable built product for SMBs as well as large enterprises.

Now let me just finish with talking about what makes the Grow Data platform unique. It brings AI powered intelligence, no code, data transformation and flexible data management together in one complete solution. Businesses can analyze trends, predict demand, personalize customer interactions using built in AI without needing a robust data science team. There are no code tools. They make it easy to clean, join, prepare and data visualize content that users who don’t have that reliance on IT to write complex code. Plus unlimited user access that we provide means that anyone in the company can tap into data driven insights, not just a select few because you only have so many seats available. Unlike traditional platforms that focus only on ERP, Grow Data platforms connect data from across the business. Whether it’s CRM, E-commerce, supply chain, IoT and anything you can think of, companies can get a complete picture of their operations. Businesses can control cost by managing their data refresh and prioritizing clinical information, ensuring real time insights without unnecessary expenses. It’s all because we’ve built it specifically for manufacturers and distributors. It delivers the tools and intelligence that matter most to those makers, movers and sellers without the complexity of a generic data platform.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah, John, thanks for that. It sounds like what you’ve really done is taken this aspect of understanding that at the heart of it businesses, manufacturers, they want to be able to, if they’re going to buy a solution, they want to be able to get value quickly. And in order to do that, you need to have a purpose built solution that’s built for them as opposed to everybody. So it’s great that you’re doing that. You know, one thing that I’m curious about is, you know, when we’re talking about going beyond the ERP, I would assume it also involves things like data lakes. Why is that such an important component?

John Carrico: That’s a great question, Keith. And it’s an important concept to really explain to our SMB customers. And a lot of SMB customers hear a lot about big data and data lakes and AI and machine learning. But those terms have traditionally been in the realm of large enterprises with teams of data scientists or data architects and cloud engineers, people who build and maintain massive data infrastructures. And that’s not the reality for most SMBs. Their frame of reference is a traditional BI system. Their understanding has been that if you wanted to analyze large amounts of data, you really needed to have a highly structured data warehouse. Which means spending a ton of time up front cleaning, categorizing and formatting your data before you could even start to use it. That’s a big lift, especially for an SMB with limited IT resources. But I’ll pause here and say in reality it’s not such a big lift with our low code data transformation tools from our Grow BI solution and now our Grow Data Platform application. Let me get back to data lakes here real quick. Data Lake changes the game. Instead of spending months structuring your data before you can do anything with it, you can just load it in as is, structured or unstructured, and organize it later when you need it.

So that really means that you start collecting valuable business data right away from all kinds of sources inside and outside your company without getting stuck in IT bottlenecks. Unlike a traditional data warehouse that requires heavy IT involvement and expensive structuring, a private data lake in the Grow Data platform is a more cost effective way to store those vast amounts of data needed for AI and analytics. And instead of spending time formatting data up front, businesses can load that’s structured like sales transactions or inventory records and unstructured data like emails, PDF or even sensor logs. You know they could do that as is making it available for AI driven insights. That’s because AI models really need large amounts of data to detect patterns, predict demand associated decision making and a data lake provides an affordable way to store everything without driving up cost. Now Keith, additionally, I think when we think about generative AI including the network of vertical agents that compromise our Epicor Prism solution, we’ll be able to interact with the data lake, allowing users to ask questions and get answers from their data in a natural conversational way. This really is a game changer to our solutions, becoming a cognitive ERP instead of a traditional one that relies typically on predefined workflows or static data processing.

Now since our Grow Data platform also give businesses control over how often data updates, companies can prioritize frequently access data for high performing day to day operations in a data warehouse while also keeping raw data cost efficiently stored, ensuring they get both real time insights and long term analytics without breaking the budget now when speaking to SMBs, we also emphasize that private part of the private data lake. And that’s because, as you know Keith, SMBs need reinsurance about security of their data and their IP. Now we work to dispel the notion that they may have that cloud based data solutions mix their data with everybody else’s data in a multi-tenant environment or the data that can be used to train other people’s AI models for other companies. That’s not the case with our Grow Data platform. Your data lake is private to your business. You own it, you control it, and it’s stored in a way that’s more secure and scalable in the cloud than anything you might try on local servers. So really what we’re doing with the Grow Data platform is bringing the power of the big data down market, giving SMB’S the same AI driven insights, analytic capabilities that enterprises have without requiring an army of data scientists and the high cost to manage it. That’s where we think it’s a real game changer.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Well John, it certainly sounds like it will be because if you think about sort of the larger trends in terms of organizations, whether large enterprises or SMBs, they’re hearing all about this AI and being able to interact with their data and query it in a natural way instead of having to become a power user. So I think this really will help these companies that don’t want to, they want to focus on their business. They don’t want to focus on having to build specific integrations and rejiggering the entire interface just to get at the data they need to run their business. But one thing I’m curious about is once companies are actually able to get the data in there, are there additional pain points that they may have to solve for in order to really kind of get up to speed quickly?

John Carrico: Yeah, definitely. So once your data is in the Grow Data platform, it tackles several key challenges businesses face with traditional BI and traditional data management. First off, it goes beyond that traditional BI by leveraging data lakes, AI and machine learning to handle modern business demands at scale for businesses overwhelmed by big data. Its intuitive setup simplifies storing, managing and preparing data without requiring coding expertise like you just talked about. Another major challenge is controlling data costs. Grow Data Platform provides full visibility into expenses, allowing businesses to control pipeline by pipeline, how much data is processed, how often it’s refreshed, and how that impacts their cost. Finally, for companies that are already using third party BI tools, Grow Data Platform will act as a central source of truth aggregating, cleaning and standardizing. Data before distributing it back to preferred tools. Now the platform ingests data into a data lake from multiple sources, including Epicor’s ERPs, third party applications or partner solutions and external BI tools. With a selection of over 150 connectors, including a Universal REST API connector, that solves the challenge of accessing data across the customer ecosystem of products. From there, automated pipelines can handle data transformation and movement, whether it’s flowing into Snowflake for high speed analytics and AI use cases, or staying in the data lake for insights that thrive on massive amounts of data.

Now with this foundation in place, it reduces the challenge. end users need to rely on their IT teams for support. And they can also visualize those key metrics and trends through interactive dashboards, giving them a clear real time view of performance across operations, finance, sales, supply chain, whatever they need there. And when using pre-built dashboards or customizing reports to track specific KPIs, users can explore the data, identify any opportunities or make informed decisions faster. Oftentimes, what we’ve done is embedded in the ERP as well in their workflows to make it much easier. All without that need of IT or data science expertise.

Keith Kirkpatrick: You know, I think one thing that really resonated with me there is the fact that the Grow Data platform really is sort of that central single source of truth and you need to have that to really make informed decisions. And of course, if you want to use AI, it’s only going to be as good as the data it has access to. Without that, you’re really just, you know, having fun with science experiments. So maybe we can go beyond, you know, the science experiment talk and actually hear about what some of your customers are doing now with the Grow Data platform. What are they excited about? Can you give me a couple examples?

John Carrico: Yeah, definitely. And they’re at the core of everything we do. Our customers are driving into our recently released Epicor Prism network of vertical AI agents, which is embedded directly in our manufacturing ERP and soon to be in our distribution ERP in about a month here. This is a big leap forward in our transformation of that cognitive ERP experience. But what we’ve seen from some of our manufacturing customers, for example, we had one cabinet manufacturer state that Prism is going to help them access information a lot quicker and free up time to do more value added tasks like sending out more quotes. And more specifically, they said that time or the lack thereof is a big challenge for them. I’m sure it is for a lot of us because the jobs and the schedule changes so rapidly on some of their jobs and a big challenge thatnour solution’s providing them the ability to overcome access to this information a lot quicker. We had another manufacturer state that they see an opportunity for about a 20% gain in their operation by reducing delivery times. It’s one of the most important metrics for them. It’s on time delivery. And they stated that they really think our PRISM solution can increase their responsiveness to customers and get a typical eight week delivery time down to four weeks. So we’re really excited about the engagement we’re having with the customers and the fast returns that we’re seeing from them. And it’s only been out for a couple months and we’re already seeing tremendous, tremendous feedback and you know, excitement from our customers about it.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Sounds great, and I think, you know, one of the other things that you’re kind of alluding to there, and I’m hoping you can expand on a little more, is, you know, obviously Grow Data platform is going to be able to impact, you know, in efficiency, reduce time, allow folks to spend time on the things that really matter or that really need more attention. But there’s also an overall sort of customer experience impact to all of this, you know, because I, I think if you think about a customer, you know, interacting with a company and if it takes too long to get the information they need, sometimes they’ll say, you know what, let me turn that page. Can you talk to me a little bit about, you know, how you’re able to help your customers provide a better customer experience?

John Carrico: Yeah, Keith, this is probably one of the most important things for our customers. And you know, our data platform is all about helping our customers deliver a better experience to their customers by making sure the right data is not only available, but actually useful in the moment it matters. For example, let’s take our Grow AI Item Advisor solution which runs on top of the Grow data platform enhances the order process in our Profit21 ERP system by recommending additional items that align with the customer is already buying. That means a faster, more relevant service for that end customer and it’s increased revenue for our customers. So as Grow AI’s data duplication is another solution that we’re bringing to the market, it helps clean up messy records and prevent new duplicates from being entered. That’s really huge when you’re trying to avoid confusions in sales or, or when a customer calls about a support question, they make sure that they have the right access to the right information, especially during those type of high, high stress High stake customer interact actions or during an acquisition process when you want to try to reduce the number of duplications you have as part of that. And that’s just the beginning.

With the foundation that the Grow Data platform provides, bringing together structured and unstructured data from across the business, we see a lot of potential for future use cases. Powered by our Prism generative AI agents and our workflow automations and Grow AI’s machine learning. Imagine things like automated quote generation, personalized follow up or AI engines that can assist a customer service rep in real time, servicing the right data from across their ecosystem. Now, by connecting one or more of their data and enabling smarter AI assisted workflows, the Grow Data platform helps our customers respond faster, offer more personalized service and ultimately build stronger relationships with their customers. With the Grow Data platform and our Grow AI, the customer experience isn’t just about responding to a customer’s needs, it’s about anticipating them. And so we’re really excited about the experience we’re able to provide with this new solution.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, it sounds great, John. And if you think about what Epicor seems to be saying to me, the messaging, it’s about not kind of keeping this functionality, which is really kind of what everyone is trying to do with the large enterprise customer. You’re bringing that down so the entire market can actually have access to those tools and that functionality in a very cost effective way. Not just initially, but of course over time because you’re not having to pay developers and everyone else to kind of maintain that.

John Carrico: Yeah, exactly. You’re exactly right, Keith. We’re really excited about it and the feedback we’re getting from our customers has just been tremendous.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, that’s great. Well, thank you very much for joining me here, John. This has been a pleasure. You know, hopefully over time we’ll be able to talk again and hear more results from you and your customers.

John Carrico: Yeah. Thank you, Keith. Thanks for the time today. We appreciate it.

Keith Kirkpatrick: Great. All right, well, thank you all for joining me here on the Six Five Media Virtual Webcast. And if you’re out there watching, please like and subscribe and we’ll see you again really soon.