Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of industry-specific enterprise software to promote business growth, this week, hosted its annual MENA Customer Summit, which concentrated on how the cloud can enable enterprises to reinvent themselves amid the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The event held at the One & Only Royal Mirage, Dubai, on June 18 provided regional businesses the opportunity to network with Epicor customers from across the manufacturing, distribution and hospitality industries. Epicor experts also shared key insights, trends and updates, focusing on the Epicor ERP and Epicor iScala solutions.

Epicor’s keynote speakers demonstrated to delegates how digital transformation can fuel growth and elevate their businesses to new levels of agility, innovation, productivity and security. “We are dedicated to providing solutions that meet the unique challenges of the markets we serve,” said Andy Coussins, senior vice president and head of Epicor International. “Our industry-specific expertise drives everything we do and allows us to laser-focus our product development. This ensures that as our customers embrace digital transformation, they have verticalised best practice at the heart of their business. This approach, together with our people, makes us stand out against other solutions in the market that simply can’t match us in industry depth and breadth.”

Another priority area for this year’s summit was the Connected Enterprise. Epicor has been a leader in creating awareness about the benefits of the Connected Factory, urging regional manufacturers to innovate for the future and ready themselves for an inevitable outcome of Industry 4.0. The latest version of Epicor ERP―which was released in April 2019—enables environments where factories, warehouses, machines and people are connected—in a single interoperable ecosystem―to improve productivity and competitiveness. Epicor experts discussed how organisations can use such connectivity to introduce automated data collection, IoT, workflows, processes, notifications and exception handling, that have traditionally been manual and labour-intensive.

One of the highlights of the event was a Q&A with His Excellency Ali Bin Mohammed AlMuwaijei, a special guest at the summit, and Head of Audit and Governance at Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA). Focusing on the theme of ‘data is the new oil’, Ali said, “Enterprises are beginning to understand the business imperative of the Internet of Things, as well as AI and data science. Industry 4.0 will enable them to improve efficiencies while reducing costs, and we are proud of the work we have done in making businesses aware of just how much they can grow through cloud-connected technologies. Establishing intelligent ecosystems powered by vast data mountains is important in creating the smart society envisioned by our wise leaders. By 2020, there will be 30 billion connected devices on this planet, consuming data that is growing at an unfathomable rate—in the past two years we humans have created more data than in the previous 5,000 years of our history. Knowledge-based societies, powered by enhanced communications and data accumulation, are the future.”

Epicor also used the summit to honour customers from the region that have leveraged its ERP offerings to harness such data mountains. The 2019 Epicor Customer Excellence Award winners in the MENA regional programme are:

• South Africa based, Nature’s Choice is the Business Transformation winner, chosen for clearly demonstrating best-in-class business transformation and measurable business value from its Epicor ERP implementation
• The winner in the Technology Innovator category is Epicor ERP customer, Sonamet. The Angola based organisation was selected for demonstrating how it has used technology to drive innovation throughout the business to achieve measurable success
• Vinnell Arabia, from Saudi Arabia, was recognised for demonstrating measurable business benefits with Epicor Cloud ERP and is the winner in the Cloud Deployment category

“The MENA region has seen a significant shift in priorities in the last few years, moving from an oil economy to a knowledge economy, resulting in opportunities for enterprises to reinvent themselves in the cloud. As industries across the region continue to expand, Epicor is focused on enabling growth by bringing the best in industry-specific digital solutions to our customers here,” concluded Coussins.