Manufacturing

Inventory control is challenging for manufacturing businesses. Many manufacturers have poor visibility into supplier inventory, lead times, and other critical data, making it difficult to plan production schedules, maintain inventory levels, and fulfil orders. When manufacturers lack customer-facing data from EDI, it’s nearly impossible to synchronise inventory with shipment updates, which leads to double counting inventory items and creates backorders due to unexpected fulfilment delays.

A powerful ERP solution overcomes inventory control issues by leveraging bill of material information as the basis for automated inventory forecasts. An ‘Intelligent Forecast’ report predicts material requirements by examining previous customer orders and associated BOMs and applying advanced algorithms to recommend future inventory requirements. The BOM report guides your manufacturing process while helping your planners make intelligent decisions. An ERP solution also leverages common EDI interfaces to integrate with eCommerce systems, automatically launching new purchase orders when inventory drops to a user-defined level, ensuring optimised inventory, and preventing stockouts.

Many SMBs must wait 90 days or more to receive customer payments. But because manufacturers need cash to purchase their inventory, many turn to financing, either by loan or factoring. Factoring involves a financial firm assuming your payment risk, so if your B2B customer doesn’t pay, your business still receives payment. The downside of loans and factoring is that if you can’t provide the financing company with data that supports the viability of the customer orders, the finance company takes a larger fee to account for the higher risk.

The right ERP solution helps you get paid faster and have more cash available to keep operations going. With digitised customer information, you can quickly aggregate data supporting your customer/order viability claims. Knowledge of customer, order, and SKU details and projected costs, revenue, and time lines lead to lower loan rates and factoring fees.  

Competing against manufacturers operating in lower-cost labour markets requires you to find innovative business practices to avoid competing on price. However, your products facing off against foreign, low-cost competitors no longer means the end of your business.

A robust ERP solution helps manufacturers reinvent their business models. Rather than competing on the cost per unit produced, they become higher-value-add businesses. They add new channels of distribution and sales, expand sales territories, open additional warehouses, tap into CRM, and offer more services. ERP provides the standardisation, controls, and integrations that enable your organisation to shift its operations and overcome challenges. Vision33, as your local expert, will map your existing business processes and recommend how to improve the efficiency, work flows, and reporting that will benefit your business as you define your new identity.

Digital transformation is making your business run better by using technology to create new—or modify existing—business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.

Vision33’s Saltbox Platform for integration and work flows provides the pathways to add new systems and processes and modify existing processes for greater flexibility and agility.

When integrated with an ERP solution, Saltbox offers innovative connections between systems and ways of accessing and using applications and data with both automation and human interactions in work flows through application builders and forms.

With the Vision33 portals, near-real-time integration with Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, and connections for Amazon and Facebook shops, an ERP solution is ideal for eCommerce. Whether it’s for increasing sales or attracting new customers, ERP supports your sales efforts.

Superior inventory management is critical to manufacturers’ ability to meet their commitments. When you can see inventory in real-time and automate around perfectly timed replenishment, you no longer accidentally under stock or waste resources tied up in stock. Production runs smoothly while your customers enjoy consistently on-time deliveries. 

Advance Adapters Exceeds Revenue Doubling

The complex products of Advance Adapters require detailed information-sharing with customers and prospects. The manufacturer switched to a powerful ERP solution and more than doubled its revenue by better managing its production lines and streamlining customer views and feedback around project-specific data.

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If you’re a discrete or process manufacturer (e.g., food and beverage, medical device, or auto parts), traceability is necessary for product and consumer safety. You must see forward and backward in your supply chain and identify where faulty ingredients/components originated, where they were incorporated into finished products/batches, and which customers received them.

 During a recall, customers and regulators expect to see:

• manufacturer identity
• manufacturer address
• ingredient/component names
• ingredient/component suppliers
• manufacturer's batch/lot number
• customers’ receiving data
• transportation and distribution records
• expiration dates (food and beverage, pharmaceuticals)

 

Attempting to track this information manually is overwhelming—and insufficient. That’s why SMBs that use an ERP solution’s traceability feature have a leg up on their competition.

Highlights of Traceability Using ERP

• Understand and track a product’s complete life cycle via batch and lot codes. 
• Track materials and products from procurement through production, sale, and delivery.
• Enforce rules to ensure correct allocation of batch and lot codes.
• Batch track raw materials or components and the units created as part of a production order. 
• Incorporate work flows that create product labels and prohibit products from moving further in the fulfilment cycle before label verifications occur.
• Stay updated on the evolving rules and regulations governing product safety and quality checks.

The manufacturing industry is fast-paced. Automation helps you keep up by improving productivity, reducing costs associated with waste, and increasing agility. For example, with ERP, the system that contains your inventory data can automatically create BOMs. This eliminates the data silos made by disconnected systems and prevents inaccurate materials requirements, miscommunications, production bottlenecks, and shortages.

How to Become Data-Driven With a Single, Unified ERP System

Manufacturers often struggle to share information between systems. Read how an ERP solution’s central database of product, operational, and business data automates and accelerates your manufacturing business.

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Engine Manufacturer Eliminates Manual Processes to Focus on Growth

After implementing the right ERP solution, this business enjoys automated processes for accurately quoting customers, empowering salespeople, managing orders, and providing traceability from the warehouse through in-field service care. 

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Vision33 offers two web portals for ERP: Customer Portal and Employee Portal. Each portal makes your ERP solution a powerful enabler for speeding daily work and saving your staff from the burden of mundane support tasks.

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Customer Portal gives customers a secure, flexible, and personalised self-service gateway to view their accounts in a standard web browser. It’s a convenient way for your customers to make online payments and manage orders in an environment that builds your brand identity.

B2B Marketplace, an extension to Customer Portal, allows companies to offer their customers a complete B2B shopping experience by giving them online access to order and account information in a familiar shopping cart format—anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Features include:

• Easy access to account information
• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Support for multiple currencies and languages
• Access to order history
• Catalogue views
• Multiple payment options

Read more about B2B Marketplace

Employee Portal puts your employees in the driver’s seat with a real-time, web-based solution that’s seamlessly integrated with your ERP solution. Employee Portal is ideal for employees who don’t need a named ERP user license but need to access its data. With real-time, on-demand data access, report viewing and modification, and user-level security, Employee Portal gives your staff cost-efficient and flexible tools to get their work done wherever they are.

Read more about Employee Portal