Manufacturing/Distribution

Businesses look to ERP systems to meet the following critical manufacturing and distribution needs:

Assembly Management

• Manage component quantities and multi-level assemblies more effectively by building on information across inventory and warehouse management
• Build multi-level assemblies one level at a time or all at once.

Work Orders

• Replenish standing inventory levels of finished goods or special-order work built to exact specifications for a particular customer
• Continuously monitor stock levels for automatic re-stocking and re-ordering, for instance, auto-generating purchase orders to support just-in-time (JIT) re-ordering.

Bill of Materials (BOM)

• Cover all of the components required for a single assembly, as well as the components required by a particular work order, with multi-level BOM functionality
• Include assembly instructions with the printable BOM in PDF format.

Demand Planning

• Improve forecasting accuracy and sharpen responsiveness to customer demand by taking into account both sales order and forecasted demands
• Rapidly boost profitability with improved days on-hand (DOH) inventory reporting.

Product History Tracking

• Maintain a complete history for each product assembly and kit so that warehouses can more efficiently track component levels and manage raw materials, WIP and finished product inventories
• View final products as individual units or with all components listed and serialized
• Tear down builds and reuse components if needed.

Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP)

• The MRP engine uses industry-proven algorithms and proceed level-by-level through the bill of materials (BOM) starting with the top level, reviewing the demands and safety stock requirements and netting out the inventory and firmed (or greater) supplies
• The review process also covers first suggested reschedules for firmed (or greater) supplies and creates planned supplies as appropriate.

Production Engineering

• Production Engineering ensures that changes propagate effectively and intelligently, and that engineering changes are reflected in down-stream deliverables, plans and inventories
• Capabilities include item master maintenance, bill of material maintenance, item and bill of material revision control and engineering change control.

Shop Floor Control

• Leverage 360-degree visibility to gain more control over WIP and manufacturing operations and management—with real-time status updates and seamless data capture to help track, manage and optimise cycle times
• Manage the lifecycle of the work order and the routing that's used as a basis for defining the steps or processes that are required in item assembly and manufacture.

Project Control

• Enhance P/L variance with deep analytics and tracking controls, which assist in understanding planned versus actuals to help drive business success
• Project Control capability also enables inventory control tracking as well as planning and costing of items
• Plan, cost and track by "item within a project" in discrete manufacturing operations where all planning, costing and tracking is based on "item numbers."

Key benefits to implementing robust and integrated manufacturing and distribution systems include:

• Reduce complexity and inefficiency with a complete manufacturing solution that enables seamless business from customers' orders to manufacturing to shipping and order tracking.
• Enable dynamic and intelligent demand planning, integrated inventory management, and procurement management—all in one system.

• Reduce lag between customers' demands and the ability to re-plan  manufacturing resources, reducing inventory on-hand while reducing stock-outs and improving SLAs.
• Gain more control over the  business with real-time business intelligence that constantly tracks manufacturing KPIs.