We recently carried out a successful Kinetic upgrade on behalf of Advanced Electronics.
To reflect on the project, we talked to Advanced Electronics’ IT Manager, Julia Woollard, and covered everything from reasons for the upgrade, benefits of the new system and a range of upcoming ERP projects.
About Advanced Electronics
Advanced Electronics has been designing and manufacturing fire safety products for 25 years, protecting lives and properties in more than 80 countries worldwide.
Their range of products includes fire panels, extinguishing controls, evacuation alert systems and paging panels. It also includes Advanced Live – a smart fire management solution that provides real-time online access to advanced fire system data.
Advanced products keep people safe in schools, hospitals, shopping centres, residential housing, football stadiums and many other places.
Projects include: Newham University Hospital, University of Edinburgh, Alahabad High Court India, HMS Belfast, Wafi Hotel and Mall in Dubai, Battersea Power Station and London Bridge Station.
Advanced is part of Halmer Group which is a FTSE listed, global group consisting of an array of life-saving technology companies focusing on safety, the environment and health.
What challenges do you face as a business and how does that tie in with your ERP requirements?
The most relevant point is our dedication to providing good customer service.
We are a very fast growing company. As such, our processes now are very different to when we started.
Whereas we could initially get by with manual or paper-based processes, Excel spreadsheets and access databases, we quickly recognised that we needed an ERP system.
We adopted Epicor around 8 years’ ago but we now have over 250 employees and a real geographical spread which makes centralizing processes integral to our business.
The industry we are in is also very highly regulated, so being able to meet quality standards and demonstrate traceability through our system is really important.
With this in mind, the manufacturing specific features that Epicor could offer were an exciting bonus.
Epicor simply offered more out of the box than its competitors.
The fact that it is possible to configure almost anything to our needs, as well as the licensing and implementation being considerably cheaper than other products made it a no-brainer.
Why was the time right for the Advanced Electronics upgrade?
One of the key reasons for our upgrade was that we were running an unsupported, on-prem version of Epicor and needed to move to the latest version.
At this point we had to decide whether to stick to an on-prem solution that would require an upgrade every 18 months or if we wanted to migrate to cloud and spread the cost and support requirements into smaller chunks.
Choosing the cloud meant Epicor would take responsibility for security, keeping the software patched and for any ongoing upgrades. This would make future updates less disruptive to us as a business.
There was also the support functionality that we could access through EpiCare to consider.
Once we settled on the cloud, we knew we would essentially lift our current processes and drop them into the new version.
However, we also carried out a number of other side projects.
We had a range of solutions that handled aspects of our stock management and warehousing that we wanted to integrate with Kinetic.
We also had Sugar CRM to support our marketing and sales team. Getting these working alongside with our new system was a priority.
This is where Automation Studio came in.
Automation Studio is a really high quality, low-code integration platform that allows us to connect the likes of Aseegi and Sugar CRM to Kinetic seamlessly.
That’s been really big for our integration strategy and there are even more opportunities that we’d like to take advantage of in the future.
One will be to eliminate the need for dual entry in the system for our shipping provider. The time saving benefits and reduction in errors will be huge once we get this up and running.
So how did the project go? Any challenges deploying Epicor Kinetic?
We completed a statement of work with CBO in December 2024. The project meeting with stakeholders kicked-off on January 9th and go-live went ahead as scheduled on 3rd March 2025.
The whole project lasted around two months because we wanted to get things rolled out before our financial year end.
We had weekly meetings between ourselves and the CBO project manager, which were incredibly useful for keeping things on track and flagging any issues early before they developed.
We set up an issues tracker which again allowed us to quickly get problems investigated and fixed.
Perhaps the thing we were happiest about was how effectively CBO managed to collaborate to keep things moving.
One requirement was that CBO be available to assist us from 7am onwards as that’s when our team start work.
The fact that you guys were flexible enough to accommodate this really helped the project progress.
Overall the project ran really smoothly.
Even during the go-live weekend things moved with minimal issues – and this was impressive considering Epicor, CBO and ourselves each had to have access to the system to get it fully functional while our day-to-day operations ran as normal in the background.
Using the Teams chat to stay in touch on that weekend really helped also.
We had a lot of end-to-end testing and comprehensive on-boarding before pushing the go-live button, so we were well prepared once the project was complete.
Of course, this was helped by the fact we were essentially doing lift and shift, rather than upgrading and changing functionality at the same time.
The only exception to this was a finance-oriented project that ran at the same time called Making Tax Digital. Thankfully Pat Plant was on hand from CBO to help with this.
In terms of ongoing tasks, we now need to get the remainder of our system users from the classic interface onto Kinetic and that will involve removing some legacy integrations.
Fantastic! What was the best thing about working with CBO?
CBO has a very close relationship with Epicor and this detailed insider knowledge has been invaluable.
We would have been coming into the process completely blind if we had tried to tackle the upgrade ourselves.
The detailed technical knowledge within the CBO team was also a huge bonus. It felt like there was an expert on hand for every conceivable issue.
Organisation and management of the project was of the highest standard and having that one point of contact in the form of the CBO Project Manager kept things streamlined.
Having weekly meetings to assess how things were going meant we could accelerate things when needed.
Flexibility on the part of CBO was particularly impressive. The fact that our work patterns were adapted to with 7am starts and weekend work from the staff at your end allowed us to complete the project with minimal disruption to our everyday processes.
What’s next for Advanced in the world of ERP?
We have a number of other engagements that are either ongoing or coming up in the near future.
The biggest is probably Order Fulfillment. This started with Joe Moorby coming in for the day to advise us on how we could do some more barcoding in our stores and dispatch section.
It has since expanded into looking into our end-to-end order processes involving multiple teams.
We think this will radically streamline and automate end-to-end operations once complete.
We’re also looking at Return Materials Authorisations (RMAs) and introducing the standard Epicor functionality to our work in this area.
There is also our Problem Action Reports (PARs) project.
Getting this set up will mean that any issues raised by a customer can be tracked and has visibility across our team.
Being able to reliably update our customers on the progress made with any issues should help to improve our customer service capabilities even further.
We’re also running a project around bin changes that will allow us to better track parts and identify where they are for stock takes.
Finally, we have an old in-house system that handles price lists, so moving that to Kinetic is a priority. This will mean our customer services team can perform a quote to the customer within Epicor fully, without relying on other systems. It should remove the need for manual entry and the possibility of user errors.
We’re really excited to work with CBO on an ever-increasing list of opportunities in the near future!
Did you enjoy our latest case study on the Advanced Electronics upgrade to Kinetic? Maybe you work in a similar industry or a fast-growing business looking to streamline processes. If so, click here to find out more about how we can help.
