Torotrak Selects Epicor® to Underpin its Business

IRVINE, Calif — Epicor Software Corporation today announced that Torotrak, a company that develops and holds the patented rights to a transformational form of variable drive technology that is proven in delivering fuel efficiency and CO2 emission improvements for vehicles, has selected the Epicor 9 next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to integrate with its design and engineering software and replace all other systems in the business.

Over the past ten years, Torotrak has built up a collection of systems and bespoke (disparate?) software solutions to address the everyday operational needs of the business, from financial management to time reporting and project management. While this solution is capable of running the business at a day-to-day level, it does not allow the company’s project teams or its management easy or reliable access to information and does not support the generation of systematic information that can be used to inform decisions, because each application acts in isolation, and requires a great deal of manual intervention to bring elements together into meaningful reports.

“Our biggest problem is getting timely, useful, validated information that can flow up to the management level and across departments to ensure we are making informed business decisions,” said Jeremy Deering, finance director responsible for IT at Torotrak. “We need to be able to view our entire business and the projects that we are working on from a single data repository.”

Epicor enables Torotrak to address several problems with a single solution. It will allow the company to address the inefficiencies and pain of moving information across different systems, while giving detailed real-time project reporting and features such as CRM, which otherwise would not have been implemented by Torotrak.

“The current systems, which are fragmented, do everything to frustrate, rather than help, our desire to have greater empowerment throughout the organisation,” added Deering. “Empowerment and accountability go hand in hand with joined up processes and ‘connected’ information, which is essential to foster confidence at all levels of the organisation. The way our systems work has to reflect the work ethic of the company, otherwise it becomes nothing more than an ideal that can’t be reached. Epicor will be linked directly into our design and engineering software to aid project management and procurement, and will also allow users to move seamlessly between it and Microsoft Project, which we also use. It’s about ensuring everyone can get the information they need, when they need it, and that we don’t duplicate effort in terms of data input and retrieval.”

Torotrak reviewed ten different ERP systems before selecting Epicor, citing the strength of Epicor’s SOA-based integration features, commitment of the company to its technology, and rich level of functionality, as key reasons for their choice.

“Integration with specialist design and engineering products is something we have spent a great deal of time on,” added Matt Muldoon, vice president for product marketing at Epicor. “These are the applications that many customers rely on to trigger every other aspect of their operation from finance to project fulfillment. By re-architecting Epicor from the ground up to take advantage of service oriented architecture (SOA), we’ve ensured that it is probably the most open and accessible ERP system available on the market today.”