Meet Jill Schoedel

Jill Schoedel is the IT Manager at Metalworks in Ludington, Michigan, and she did not arrive at the top of the org chart. She climbed it. “I’ve kind of worked my way up through the ranks over the years as IT manager,” she says, which undersells being the person the plant floor and the front office both call.

Her Epicor story is nearly as long. “We’ve been with Epicor since, I believe it’s September 2010 or 2011.” In 2022 she moved the whole operation to the cloud. And every couple of years she makes the trip to the Insights Epicor Global Customer Conference.

A Booth Visit at the End of the Conference

AI was one of Metalworks’ main initiatives this year, so when the invitation to stop by the Technology Coast Partners booth, where they were showing Fluent, arrived, Jill and Guy Wolgamott, Metalworks’ application analyst, went. Near the end of Insights, they took a quick demo. “We both thought, this is really great. We needed to take this back to Metalworks.” Back home, the reaction was the one every AI pitch gets.

Everyone was saying that it was too good to be true. But actually, it proved that it is a good software, and that people should not feel like it’s too good to be true, because it works.

Jill Schoedel · IT Manager, Metalworks

It Connected to Epicor Right Away, then it Just Worked

There was no implementation project and no issues. Andres Cubeddu, Head of Customer Success at Technology Coast Partners, walked Jill through the API key and the access scope, then worked with Metalworks’ AP specialist and Parker Kerwin to get the invoice flows running the right way.

1 day

to connect and start processing, “it may even have been a day”.

1 call

a week was all the tuning took after go-live

1 month

to 100% fully up and running on it

There wasn’t really any issues. Working with Andres, he made it very simple for us. He just made it super easy, and we can’t thank him enough.

Jill Schoedel · IT Manager, Metalworks

Metalworks’ own Fluent document analytics. Field retention of 99.6% across 298 scored AP documents. When reviewers did open a draft, they left the AI’s extraction exactly as it was.

99.4%

extraction accuracy over the trial

99.6%

of fields kept with no correction

<1min

to fix a document that needed a touch

The People who Touch it Every Day Stopped Shuffling Paper

Before Fluent, an AP invoice was verified, keyed into Epicor and balanced by hand: two minutes to fifteen, call it seven or eight on average. Approvals meant writing okay to pay on paper, copying it and walking it over.

End User Acceptance

We tell Andres all the time that Fluent is just unbelievable. To see it connect to Epicor right away and start working for us during testing, we were very, very, very happy.

Jill Schoedel · IT Manager, Metalworks