Challenger Door needed to accommodate ongoing growth by connecting employees in real time and supplying near-instantaneous access to companywide data. With Epicor Kinetic, they streamlined processes from the production floor to accounting shipping and billing, and effectively managed a decade of phenomenal growth.
Challenger Door has grown by 30 percent in each of the past eight years, and from a $30 million company in 2012 to a $70 million organization in 2016. According to Faroh, much of the credit for this phenomenal success can be attributed to Epicor ERP (now known as Kinetic). Since its implementation, the system virtualized almost every aspect of the company, while increasing overall efficiencies and providing a far better understanding of corporate metrics.
“Our people rely on Epicor solely to get the job done,” explained Faroh. “We wanted the best system in the business. We chose Epicor ERP [Kinetic] because it offered a flexible solution that could easily be customized to meet both existing and future needs. Every person with a computer at the company now relies on Epicor in one way or another. From quote to cash, employees are connected in real time and able to answer queries and research historical data instantaneously.”
In addition, Challenger Door has been extremely appreciative of the way Epicor ERP assisted people on the floor to build doors, and-as a result-make more money for the company. In the past, the specifications for each part and completed project had to be tabulated manually-taking anywhere from one-and-one-half to two hours for each precise computation. Epicor eliminated this process by automatically performing the calculations and supplying the necessary cut sizes to the production team via electronic tablets, so everyone is ready to start building upon arriving in the morning. Not only did the system free staff from these complex mathematical efforts, it also streamlined processes to enable the company to complete more intricate jobs in significantly less time.
Faroh noted that many of his customers are still operating with varying levels of technology. “Some of our clients are extremely sophisticated in technology, while others still handle transactions mainly in paper. With Epicor, it doesn't matter. We can easily e-mail customers purchase orders and other job details or print it out for their review. On our end, it's all equally simple.”
The company benefits from the way Epicor stores historic data on “everything we build” for ready retrieval and display in spreadsheets and one-sheet summaries. This has given Challenger Door “an excellent picture of how everything looks from accounting and purchasing to shipping and billing.”
According to Challenger Door IT manager Jared Myers, Cre8tive Technology and Design-a member of the Epicor Channel Partner Program and a leading provider of business solutions and software-has provided Challenger Door with not only another layer of flexibility, but also the ability to readily meet changing customer demands. “Partners like Cre8tive have enabled us to build whatever we want out of the system,” said Myers. “They helped us develop solutions beyond what we could do ourselves. Thanks to Cre8tive and Epicor, everything we need is now at our fingertips. Anything we want to do is literally achievable. They have changed the way we do business.”
“Without Epicor and Cre8tive's assistance, we could not have handled the ever-growing workload. Before Epicor, we really didn't understand how all the processes worked together. Now we know exactly what it takes to get a project started, finalized, and turn a profit,” said Myers.
