Ask the Experts: Eliminating the Gap Between Engineering and Operations with QBuild

Every product starts in engineering, but too often the data needed to manufacture, source, and deliver that product gets trapped in disconnected systems. When engineering teams and ERP systems aren't working from the same information, manufacturers can face delays, manual work, and costly errors.

Recently, Jennifer Triftshauser, Senior Director of Product Management at Epicor, sat down with Natalie Fernandez of QBuild to discuss how Engineering-to-ERP connectivity helps manufacturers create a single source of truth, streamline operations, and build a stronger foundation for future innovation.

Jen Triftshauser

For customers who may not know QBuild, can you tell us who you are and the role you play in the Epicor ecosystem?

Natalie Fernandez

Absolutely. QBuild is a software development company helping manufacturers bridge the gap between engineering and business. We've been helping Epicor customers connect engineering and Epicor for over 15 years now, allowing teams to work from the same source of truth. The overall goal for our products is to eliminate manual work, improve data accuracy in Epicor, and make sure that engineering data is useful across the whole business.  

Jen Triftshauser  

Great. So, let's start with a problem first. Why is the connection between engineering and ERP so often a bottleneck for manufacturers?

Natalie Fernandez

Engineering is usually where product changes begin, but Epicor is where those changes need to become operational. And so that bottleneck happens when the handoff between engineering and Epicor is slow, manual, or inconsistent. If engineering data needs to be re-entered or chased down before it can move into Epicor, it’s creating
production delays and increasing the risk of errors. 

The issue is not with engineering work itself; it’s in that gap between design and execution. When engineering data isn't available for the business, delays are being created before production can begin. Your planning slows down, and ultimately it’s the customer who has to wait.

Jen Triftshauser

So those back-office folks — purchasing, production, operations teams — that’s who you're talking about.

Natalie Fernandez

That's right.

Jen Triftshauser

From Epicor's perspective, we've always believed ERP should connect the entire business. QBuild often talks about Engineering-to-ERP integration rather than just CAD-to-ERP integration. What's the difference?

Natalie Fernandez

CAD-to-ERP is a small part of the puzzle, although an important part. But Engineering-to-ERP is all-encompassing. It captures the full range of engineering systems and processes that feed manufacturing. So things like nesting, engineering change management, and BOM processes are important workflows. The goal of QBuild’s products is to eliminate those data silos and bridge the gaps between the entire system, so product data moves cleanly from engineering into operations. That way, the entire business is connected around the full product lifecycle instead of a single design file or one system.

Jen Triftshauser

And many customers know QBuild for CADLink, but your portfolio goes much further. You've mentioned a few of these as examples, but can you walk us through the broader Q-Suite offering?

Natalie Fernandez 

CADLink is our flagship product, and it is often how customers first get to know QBuild. But our broader Q-Suite offering goes well beyond that. The bigger story for us really is Engineering-to-ERP, which means supporting the full range of those engineering systems that need to feed manufacturing.

Some of our other products, such as NestLink, allow manufacturers to seamlessly connect their nesting softwares with Epicor. We also offer a product called ECx Manager, which manages engineering changes and allows users to put in approval workflows and recommend dispositions before a change is actually pushed to Epicor.

Lastly, our newest product, ePartsBook, is a tool used to easily identify components on serialized machine drawings. So for companies that need to service their products out on their customer shop floors, their customers can report a broken piece of equipment, and our Kinetic users will be able to easily identify that component within their overall assembly. As we continue to expand our customer base, we're discovering new challenges that manufacturers are facing and building products to address those issues.

Jen Triftshauser

Can you share an example of a recent customer challenge that QBuild helped to solve?

Natalie Fernandez

Absolutely. I have a customer that I've recently had the pleasure of taking over account management for, called Northern Transformer. They're a liquid power transformer manufacturer based in Ontario, and they've been a QBuild customer since 2017. Before CADLink, their engineers were manually entering information into Epicor. They had to go through their CAD models (they were using Inventor as their system) and extract all those properties out and manually re-type them.

As with all manual data entry, this led to typos, incorrect quantities, and even examples of incorrect material selections. This in turn led to production delays, since the BOM and Epicor included errors.

We provided them with CADLink as an add-in directly to their Inventor environment. Their engineers didn't need to leave the Inventor interface, and they didn't even need to open Epicor to get the Inventor Bill of Materials (BOM) into Epicor. Instead, CADLink read directly from their Inventor model, which already included all the metadata.

This provided validation that the BOM included all the information needed to get everything into Epicor automatically.

Jen Triftshauser

Impressive. One of my other favorite products of QBuild‘s is NestLink. I know we've talked about a shared customer in Wisconsin often. Can you share an example of how customers use NestLink and the value it brings?

Natalie Fernandez

Absolutely – NestLink is also my favorite product! 

I may be biased because I've been involved in a lot of NestLink projects and I get to see firsthand how it helps customers out. So, if a customer is a sheet metal manufacturer — or even a glass, wood, or fabric manufacturer — NestLink takes the information from an Epicor job and automatically creates a work order in the nesting software. Companies using Nest Link don’t need to use job travelers, as that physical piece of paper is no longer necessary.

My favorite part is after a nest is done cutting, NestLink can take the cutting results from that nesting software and create job and material transactions back in Epicor! Since it's not an actual person entering the data, it's all taken from the nesting system. Epicor is now aware of the exact time that was spent on the job and if any remnants were created from the job;  we issue all of that material automatically.

Jen Triftshauser

That's amazing. I loved seeing that in person when I visited that customer a few years ago.

Switching gears a bit,  everyone's talking about AI manufacturing right now. What does engineering data have to do with AI success as it relates to QBuild?

Natalie Fernandez

AI is all the rage right now, but I think it's really important for people to remember that AI depends on high-quality data, and connecting engineering with ERP creates accurate product data for AI to make use of. There's a few different ways I see AI intersecting with our products.
Firstly, since our tools are based on making sure Epicor has accurate information, by getting CAD and nesting information into Epicor in a clean and structured way, Kinetic’s Prism tool can automate that data, it can analyze it, it can use it to make decisions for other areas of the business outside of engineering.

Within CADLink itself, we also have something called the Custom Logic Module, which works alongside AI large language models. We have created documentation from years of customer examples, which customers are now using to empower ChatGPT or Claude to generate and deploy custom code faster than they would in a proprietary code environment. Our customers have used this module to set global conditions, if-then rules, automatic routings, and even custom BOM restructuring. And they're able to do all of this on their own without coming back to QBuild to write more custom software just through the power of AI.

Jen Triftshauser

It reduces risk for upgrades and improves deployment models so they can use the software quicker. That‘s helpful.

We're coming to the end of our time here. If there's one thing you'd like Epicor customers to remember about Engineering-to-ERP, what would it be?

Natalie Fernandez

I would like Epicor customers to remember that Engineering-to-ERP is about connecting the full product lifecycle. It's not just about moving data from one system to another. When engineering systems, processes, and ERP are all connected, the whole business is going to benefit — from engineering and planning to purchasing and operations. The ERP gets better visibility, and your users are doing less manual work, which is going to result in fewer errors, and a much smoother path from design to delivery. When you bridge that gap between engineering and ERP with Qbuild Software, you're ultimately providing your organization with a stronger foundation to work from.

Jen Triftshauser

That's great advice, and we really value this partnership between Epicor and QBuild. Thank you, Natalie.

Natalie Fernandez

Thanks so much, Jen.