Marshall Aerospace Selects Epicor's ERP System
Marshall Aerospace, one of the largest UK aircraft maintenance, engineering and operations companies, has selected the Epicor 9 next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to underpin its business as part of a multi-phase change management project to transform the organisation’s core business processes.
With an annual turnover of over £250m, nearly 1,800 staff and over 80 years of experience in the aviation engineering and support industry, Marshall Aerospace has built an enviable reputation as one of the world’s premier suppliers of commercial and military aircraft maintenance and customisations.
Epicor will replace a 10-year-old finance system, as well as many functions of an internally developed system, Tandem, which evolved over the last 20 years. A core team of seven business managers from across Marshall Aerospace will work full time on the project along with two IT consultants. Epicor will take over all human resource functions, purchasing, inventory, warehousing, sales processing, project management, and enable process enforcement across the business. Within the aerostructures and systems division, Epicor will also be providing full manufacturing functionality to enable the production and management of medium volume manufacturing runs, something this division has not had before.
“This is a huge business transformation project for Marshall Aerospace, that will not only unify our systems and processes across the organisation, but provide an ERP platform to support our long-term strategic goals in line with our ‘Horizon 2020’ company growth strategy,” said Alan Paul, head of information and communication technology (ICT) and security. “We’re looking at all our processes and questioning how we can make them better. We’ll be using Epicor to provide us with greater efficiencies and enforce the new processes we put in place. One of the key things we want to do is remove the islands of automation that exist and control our workflows across departments within a single solution wherever we can.”
Marshall Aerospace’s bespoke system, Tandem, will not be retired in phase one of the project as there are some specialised tasks, such as hangar scheduling, that will be reviewed in later phases. There will be a number of real-time interactions between Epicor and Tandem that are made possible by Epicor Service Connect, which, through workflows designed in a visual interface, is able to control the flow of information with absolute integrity between the two systems.