Epicor Introduces Customer Profit Analyzer Application
Tool allows distributors to quickly track individual customer profitability and spot trends.
Epicor Software Corporation today announced the introduction of the Epicor Customer Profit Analyzer, a business intelligence solution that reveals a distributor’s most profitable (and least profitable) customers. Based on an equation that considers a combination of factors, Epicor Customer Profit Analyzer allows a distributor to easily understand the gap between customers' transactional “gross margin” and the company's net profit.
“Understanding which customers are the most and least profitable—and why—can result in significant net profit growth for any business,” said Kevin Roach, executive vice president and general manager, ERP Americas for Epicor. “In contrast to traditional Activity-Based Costing systems, which are often prohibitively complex and too costly to implement, Customer Profit Analyzer provides a simple tool for distributors looking to segment and analyze their customer base to drive adjustments in their business strategy.”
Using data available in a distributor’s Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Customer Profit Analyzer answers such critical questions as:
- Can you identify your top 10 most profitable customers? If so, what are you doing to protect those customers from ever leaving your company?
- Do you currently know how many of your customers are unprofitable?
- Do you know which group of customers is the biggest drain on your business, and what you need to do to fix the issue of eroding margins?
Customer Profit Analyzer provides all of this information in an intuitive dashboard view, while also indicating which customers' performance is trending up or down the fastest. The application creates a virtual P&L for each customer, tying cost to customer activity. This level of business intelligence allows corrective action to be taken before a downward trend becomes a major issue.
The Customer Profit Analyzer dashboard instantly reveals the top and bottom customers by profitability and trending action, along with a letter grade for each. Each distribution business has the ability to select which factors have a material impact on the customer rating—including sales, gross profit percent, number of order lines, outstanding days past due, average invoice value, credit status, etc.—and the "weight" that each factor should hold. The application will then categorize each customer accordingly, based on the data in the ERP system. All customers are evaluated by the same set of rules, providing a foundation for determining how to maximize the relationship with each customer going forward.
“By referring to the letter grade automatically assigned to each customer, sales reps should better understand the ‘rules of engagement’ when it comes to discounting or other customer requests. Decisions about business relationships will no longer be made by ‘gut feel,’ but rather, will be based on factual data,” said Roach.
Customer Profit Analyzer is available as an on-premise or hosted solution with Epicor Prophet 21 and Eclipse ERP systems. For more information, call 1.800.776.7438 and speak with an Epicor solutions specialist or e-mail info@epicor.com.
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