Epicor Reaches Additional Milestones

Epicor Opens Centre of Excellence for Retail in the United Kingdom; Appoints European Sales Director.

Epicor, a leading provider of enterprise business software solutions for the midmarket and divisions of the Global 1000, has said it is continuing to capitalise on the synergies created by the December 2005 acquisition of its Retail Solutions Division, Epicor CRS, with the opening of a new Retail centre of Excellence at the company's European headquarters in Bracknell, United Kingdom (UK).

The Retail centre of Excellence will be the central point from which Epicor will provide its newly acquired retail solutions into the international market particularly EMEA, paving the way for North American retailers to expand their global reach.

"Earlier this year, we outlined our plans to expand the Epicor CRS footprint internationally," said Mark Duffell, president and chief operating officer of Epicor.

"Our primary focus is to help our customers succeed with their global retailing initiatives by extending support in the countries where they are doing business".

"A complementary benefit of establishing a Retail centre of Excellence in the UK, is the opportunity to take additional Epicor solutions into the growing international marketplace".

Globalization is on the rise among the world's largest retailers - according to a recent report, the Top 250 retailers are doing business in a total of 118 different countries, with an average of 5.5 countries.

With over six billion global consumers, retailers face the daunting challenge of trying to reach those prospective customers that are most likely to purchase their products on an ongoing basis.

utilising the existing Epicor infrastructure, the company is expanding Epicor CRS global services and support beginning with the UK-based centre of Excellence for Retail, which will be headed by new European Sales Director, Karan Sofat.

Bringing over 20 years of international retail experience to the company, Sofat also has extensive experience with the Epicor CRS Retail suite, having co-founded KPOS Computer Systems, a UK-based CRS value-added reseller (VAR).

He most recently served as sales director with Torex Retail, following its acquisition of KPOS and brings significant depth and knowledge in retail supply chain technology and store systems to the new centre of Excellence.

Sofat will expand the retail sales and support team in the UK to support international expansion plans, such as the availability of localised versions of CRS RetailStore that are scheduled to be available in the autumn of 2006 for Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Spain and the UK.

"We're thrilled to have Karan join our retail team," said Kathy Frommer, senior vice president and general manager of Epicor CRS.

"I've had the pleasure of working with him for more than 20 years as one of our partners - his experience with our solutions, and expertise in international markets will be invaluable as we continue to expand our reach into new retail markets".

Duffell commented on the Epicor CRS milestones achieved to date, "We have already accomplished a number of initiatives we set forth at the beginning of the year for our Retail business, exploiting many of the best practices already established throughout Epicor".

"We delivered the integration of Epicor Financials to CRS Merchandising, established 24/7 global support to our retail customers, including multilingual support, and completed a CRS RetailStore implementation for one of our customers opening its first store in Japan".

"The establishment of our centre of Excellence for Retail in Europe positions us to continue to build on these successes".

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