Stephen Gould

The Pioneer Brands Trust

From the world’s leading telecommunications and computer companies to retail, athletic, and airline giants, Stephen Gould is a trusted partner to top businesses, helping them create innovative solutions to big problems.

Over 80 years, a single packaging supply store in New York grew to become a more than $1B global company. Today, family-run Stephen Gould is the largest independent supply chain solutions provider in the U.S. and has more than 40 locations worldwide. The company provides customized design, product prototype, packaging, supply chain management, warehousing, and global logistics services to over 5,000 customers.

At the heart of the business is Epicor Kinetic.

Global Scale, Custom Approach

At Stephen Gould, Jose Gomez, Applications Engineering Manager—and a founder of the 9,000+ member EpiUser user forum—supports approximately 500 Epicor Kinetic users. Gomez explained, “Today, we are live with Epicor Kinetic at six sites, and we are bringing on one or two locations every quarter. Our Mexico plant is live on Epicor Kinetic UX and fully web-based with the ability to leverage Kinetic on any device. We have a three-year goal to have all six Stephen Gould subsidiaries and 41 plants on Epicor. At the same time, we are working towards a fully operational Kinetic UX implementation.”

Gomez and Hannah Willett, Applications Engineer at Stephen Gould, have defined a deliberate change management methodology for the uplift, tackling it area by area. Willett is currently dedicated to migrating the AR/AP departments and rewriting customizations using Epicor Automation Studio.

Integrated, Automated Workflows

Stephen Gould is an early adopter of Epicor Automation Studio, an intelligent automation tool that makes it feasible for business users to act as citizen developers and integrators.

An Automation Studio expert, Willett rapid-fired the benefits of the module: “It’s an inexpensive integration tool, very easy to set up and hit the ground running, and simple to configure.” That’s a critical advantage. As Willett elaborated, “Automation Studio is intuitive to pick up. You don't need a lot of programming experience, meaning another employee who isn’t a developer could maintain our integrations. For any business, redundancy is crucial.”

Willett predicted three to four months to complete a job to automate the intracompany trading process using C#. With Automation Studio, that project was finished in just two and a half weeks. Gomez described, “If Wisconsin buys a product from Indianapolis, there is a regular AP/AR transaction. We needed the ability to create the PO in Indianapolis and have that mirror a sales order in the Wisconsin plant, and Kinetic doesn't support that natively yet.”

The other key benefit is visibility. Before, one branch could not see what another was doing. Now anyone can look at the dashboard and see where a job is in the queue and when it will ship.

However, Automation Studio allowed Stephen Gould to automate the entire intracompany process including order creation, purchase orders, invoices and shipping instructions. Further complicating the intracompany trade procedure is the need to track costs separately for each site. Gomez remarked, “We have a large mobile sales force of entrepreneurs, each owning their own business, and we provide logistical and fulfillment support. We have a unique profit-sharing structure which required a complex cost accounting and demanded that we're able to track costs efficiently and accurately throughout our system.”

Within a month, Stephen Gould was able to shift from a completely manual, weeks-long journey of phone calls and emails to initiate and track the process, to a seamless, automated and instantaneous process—a savings of incalculable manhours.

“Automation also reduced the number of errors. Once we have told the system exactly how to mirror these items, there's no chance for a human to interpret something and inject a mistake,” elaborated Willett.

“The other key benefit is visibility,” Gomez adjoined. “Before, one branch could not see what another was doing. We’ve streamlined the process to ensure that we have the right components and materials available. And now everyone can see that. Anyone can look at the dashboard and see where a job is in the queue and when it will ship.”

An Eye on Metrics

Currently, Stephen Gould monitors several exception reports. Kinetic also enabled the conversion of a manual calendar to an integrated workflow tracking calendar that everyone can easily access.

Epicor Automation Studio is intuitive to pick up. You don't need a lot of programming experience, meaning another employee who isn’t a developer could maintain our integrations. That redundancy is always important.

And Gomez has high hopes for the future: “Because we only have a handful of plants on the system, we aren’t in a position to have intensive metrics yet. One of the key drivers of implementing Kinetic is for the massive business intelligence benefits.”

Accelerating a Paperless Workplace

Until 2020, Stephen Gould was 100% paper-based for order processing systems. Gomez explained: “We knew we needed to modernize our systems and that was what Epicor was brought in to do. Then COVID hit and we had to very quickly pivot to a paperless environment.”

The biggest value of Kinetic lies 100% in the customizability. The fact is that you can mold the ERP to your business instead of trying to mold your business to the ERP. It allows for much more streamlined processes, and you make the app work for you. That's huge.

Within two weeks, Stephen Gould was able to move all operations into the latest release of Kinetic to continue operating even though they hadn’t yet finished implementation. Gomez and team leveraged the toolset to use UD tables as “holding tanks for the paper” and a few quick customizations to create a paperless workflow.

Designed to Adapt

“The biggest value of Kinetic lies 100% in the customizability,” Willett pinpointed. “The fact is that you can mold the ERP to your business instead of trying to mold your business to the ERP. It allows for much more streamlined processes, and you make the app work for you. That's huge.”

Gomez echoed, “Epicor provides you with best practices, but everyone knows best practices don’t fit all scenarios. Epicor gives you the flexibility to fit your business and then provides seamless upgrades to stay up-to-date even after you make changes. It's a game changer.”

Gomez also noted Epicor’s personalized support. “I would never be able to call one of the lead developers at SAP. While I don't do it often, if I need to, I know somebody will answer, know who I am and be willing to help. It's invaluable.”