Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 10 | Page 67

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business At a glance… Zaker Trading fuels growth with Epicor ERP implementation Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of industry- specific enterprise software to promote business growth, has announced that Zaker Trading, a one- stop-shop for specialised products and accessories in welding, lifting, safety, power tools, abrasives and other engineering-related products, has recently implemented Epicor ERP (enterprise resource planning) across all its facilities in the Middle East. improvement over earlier home-grown solutions, fell short of delivering critical functionality on-demand without the need to acquire, provision, and maintain application infrastructure. xPaaS automates tedious tasks like setup, configuration, and integration. Traditionally, developers performed each of these functions for each middleware product manually—a time-consuming, error-prone process. To communicate with the database, for example, developers needed to obtain a connection string in one place and input it into a configuration file somewhere else. With xPaaS, intuitive menus help developers select their database and get their systems up and running quickly. xPaaS also speeds time to market by accelerating trial and error. Engineers and architects can often approach development problems in multiple ways, several of which may appear equally viable, leaving teams uncertain of which to choose. Instead of having to sit and envision every scenario before writing a single line of code, developers working in an xPaaS environment can simply try different solutions and find out which works best. www.intelligentcio.com The solution is enabling Zaker Trading to streamline and automate their sales, finance and manufacturing processes as well as increase visibility, transparency and information exchange across the organisation. Finding a platform capable of supporting Zaker Trading’s growth plans was another important criterion. Jesudason explained, “We needed the new ERP system to be the backbone of the business and meet not only our current business requirements, but also serve as a platform for the next ten to fifteen years as we expand our operations and grow. It was therefore essential that the solution was built with next generation technology, as well as flexible and scalable.” In parallel, Jesudason was also keen for a solution that required minimal IT oversight and management. With just a two-man IT team for the entire organisation, they could not afford to have these valuable resources spend a significant portion of their time maintaining the new system or responding to user queries, like it was doing with the incumbent system. The company needed the new ERP solution to be easy to deploy, easy to use and most importantly, require very little maintenance. The Epicor ERP solution includes key modules such as financial management, supply chain management and inventory management and was deployed across all Zaker Group companies in the region, bringing each business unit onto a single platform. INTELLIGENTCIO 67