Kinetic is a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for manufacturing businesses.
- Epicor CPQ integrates with Kinetic to help you quote and order custom products.
- Your Kinetic users can see Epicor CPQ configurators appear within the Kinetic screens they already use.
- Your Kinetic administrators can leverage the existing part descriptions in Kinetic as they build integrated configurators in Epicor CPQ.
Share Manufacturing Logic Between Kinetic and CPQ
Here's a high-level summary. Along with many other features, Kinetic helps your company turn raw materials and components into assembled products, called "parts". To manage the materials and operations needed to create and assemble parts, Kinetic uses a "Method of Manufacture", or MOM, for each of your part revisions.
Epicor CPQ can streamline and automate the process of creating and managing MOMs in Kinetic.
- Configurators can store the business logic of a MOM within the configurator itself. For example, a Swingset configurator in Epicor CPQ can specify the necessary operations and materials to create a part revision in Kinetic.
- CPQ Configurators can also create Methods of Manufacture dyamically, based on your business rules and your customer's selections, thanks to the CPQ's powerful Snap language. For example, Snap rules can insert an aging operation of 2.5 hours into a MOM, if the type of construction meets a certain criteria:
Snap logic goes beyond simple statements like this example. Use trigonometry, web services, lookups, or other techniques: Snap is a full, Turing-complete language. - Import tables of information from Kinetic, called "BAQs", into Epicor CPQ. This data appears as standard database tables in CPQ and can be used in Snap just like any other source of data. In this way, Epicor Kinetic can remain the single source of truth for component options like materials, colors, or finishes... while Epicor CPQ handles all the logic to show these options to the customer and use them to create the custom product.
- One configurator can generate a simple part number (if this configuration has been ordered before), or a complete MOM (for completely new assemblies). Your users don't have to follow different procedures. They simply configure what they want, and the Epicor CPQ can determine what is required in Kinetic based on your business rules.
Use Cases
- A customer on your public web site, or through a partner's web site, can use Epicor CPQ to configure their custom product. The integration with Kinetic can determine if this configuration already has a standard part, or if it has never been manufactured before and needs a new part revision. CPQ's Snap logic can create the entire method of manufacture for the new part within Kinetic automatically.
- An employee using Kinetic can add a configurable part to a quote or order in Kinetic. Clicking on the part launches the full Epicor CPQ configuration experience -- with 3D models and full features -- within the Kinetic interface with no second login, or swapping between screens.