Summary- Every discrete manufacturing business operation needs a unique set of systems and specifications, and faces equally unique challenges. Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems cannot keep up with the demands of today’s rapidly changing customer needs and market requirements.
Manufacturers need specific and customized functionality to run their business effectively. When you’re looking for a perfect manufacturing ERP software with amazing features that will fully optimize your business to complete and grow. In this blog, you’ll learn all the 9 critical features for discrete manufacturers to stay competitive.
Table of Content
1. Inventory Management
A robust and cloud-based ERP inventory management module will let you the level of your stock safety, reorder levels, and cycle counts in real-time. This real-time information will help you to plan your production as per the demand requirements.
You can track the status and location of every inventory item. Inventory management systems will also bring any potential shortage to your attention so that you can correct them before they occur. A powerful ERP software helps manufacturers to rely on their inventory to build their products.
2. Supply chain Management
A supply chain management software system provides alerts and notifications when real or potential disruptions occur or opportunities are available. Supply chain software is integrated with other ERP modules to help in complexity. Supply chain management determines what materials are needed and when you need them.
Also, you can communicate with suppliers in real time about capacity, forecasts, and orders. With the help of supply chain management systems, suppliers can log into a portal to see purchase orders at any time and you can monitor how suppliers are performing.
3. Advanced Planning & Scheduling
Advanced planning & scheduling management system helps manufacturers, click and drag to move the production of an item from one planning to another production planning. You can easily interact manually with the schedule to make changes and then push out updates to the production staff.
With the help of advanced planning & scheduling you can take full control of your account business objectives, forecasts, demand, and capacity constraints to know how much product they make, when and where to make it, and what materials and resources are required for an optimized production schedule.
4. Shop Floor Execution
Shop floor execution allows supervisors to see the status of production from anywhere by using any device such as mobile, laptop, or desktop. When operators log in, all they can see their assigned work and they can also report on the status of jobs as needed.
The shop floor execution ERP module allows managers to assign workers to specific machines that they are perfectly trained on. You can also determine the productivity of each shop floor worker and see how long they take time to complete a task.
5. Quality Management
Manufacturing ERP quality management system allows you to see the data information in real-time how many items were made and you can set a standard of quality so that each product passes through quality standard and produces qualitative products.
You can keep track of all raw materials, work in progress, and finished goods. A suitable ERP quality management system will execute inspection production plans, checklists, and control quality tests against products, equipment, and people.
6. Material Requirement Planning (MRP)
Material requirement planning modules will always help during production. It can consolidate demand, production, scheduling, and inventory requirements. It uses sales orders and patterns to forecast inventory and calculate accurate raw material quantity which is needed for production. Material requirement planning feature helps to define the operational capacity in prior resources and distribute the workload as well.
7. Job Costing
Job work management ERP systems provide data from different ERP modules, such as inventory management, procurement, and shop floor execution to determine accurate job costs. Real-time information allows you to calculate the cost of each job.
Manufacturing ERP solution allows manufacturers to easily examine estimated costs by personnel, department, work center, material type, operation type, work orders, and more. You can also analyze the difference between standard and actual costs by date range, work order, sales order, lot number, etc.
8. Production Management
Production management module includes Bill of materials and material requirement planning feature to complete a list of materials and resources needed to complete a job. Production management can manage the procurement process of raw materials or services, including automated quality control checks.
In production management, BOM revisions can be tackled, or alternate ones created, to make sure the updated documents are associated with the correct production run. Production management allows you to set specific tools for machines to monitor performance, prevent out-of-spec production runs, and maximize profit capacity.
9. Business Intelligence & Analytics
Business intelligence and analytics in Absolute ERP systems reveal the pattern so that they can lead to actionable data. Manufacturers can improve their cash balance visibility and sales performance by using Absolute ERP analytics and financial Business Intelligence. It can also forecast future outcomes and discover opportunities, along with areas needing improvement, to guide strategic business plans.
The Bottom Line
Please keep in the mind that all ERP system functionality is not the same. Before implementation of any ERP system, it’s important to know what your goals are before for features of an ERP software system. Your short and long-term goals will help you to determine what you’ll need.
Absolute ERP functionality can play a vital role in your business and also helps to improve your overall business performance. The key is to find a suitable ERP partner to work with and a modern system that can meet your business requirements now and in the future is difficult, however you can invest your time on research and choose wisely.