Manufacturing has never been easy, but it’s getting harder to do profitably with every passing year. Competition never lets us. Supply chains get more complex. Deadlines and customer demands grow more urgent. How can you stay ahead? A manufacturing-centric Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution can help. Acumatica, which has specialized manufacturing capabilities, demonstrates the power of software to keep manufacturing operations profitable and competitive.
Manufacturing Challenges Today
Time was, captains of industry would say that all it took to succeed was to “build a better mousetrap.” Those were the days. Currently, to win in manufacturing, you have to build a better mousetrap out of parts built all over the world—shipped to your plant on a “just in time” basis. Your customers expect a huge variety of mousetraps at the lowest possible price, available on the fastest possible delivery schedules.
How Acumatica Addresses Today’s Manufacturing Challenges
Acumatica Manufacturing Edition offers a solution. It’s a complete, multi-site cloud manufacturing control and planning system. It works in scenarios that span job shops, batch manufacturing, make-to-order and make-to-stock. It can be used for engineer-to-order and project-centric production as well. The solution integrates production planning and shop floor with customer management. In addition, Acumatica connects sales orders, purchasing, inventory, accounting and financial reporting. All up, it delivers real-time coordination of manufacturing as it relates to activities across the entire basis.
Highlights include:
- Meeting schedules—Respond to demand while you optimize inventory and resources
- Committing to delivery—Commit to customer deliver requirements with a Capable-to-Promise (CTP) function, based on known capacity and materials
- Tracking costs—Stay on top of labor and material costs while managing products, then compare planned vs. actual costs
- Managing inventory—Know where your inventory is at any time, gaining real-time access to available inventory, inventory in transit and reorder quantities. This enables efficient distribution management, increased profitability and improved customer experience.
- Handling Bills of Materials (BOMs) and routing—Plan and manage inventories, costs, and manufacturing processes, retaining full control over revisions. Acumatica lets you see financial and engineering views of a product in a multi-level BOM structure.
- Overseeing production—Schedule shop floor production while track material and labor costs, including comparisons between planned vs. actual costs
- Conduct Material Requirements Planning (MRP)—Address requirements from customers while optimizing inventory levels
- Configuring products—stay on top of real-time price and cost rollups with a product configurator that enables multi-level, dimensional, rules-based configurations
- Estimating production costs—Estimate costs for both new or existing products, easily converting estimates into BOMs or production orders
- Managing orders—Stay on top of sales activities, streamlining procurement and automating order fulfillment in the process
- Planning and scheduling—Meet customer demands through accurate and reliable delivery dates based on resource and production capacity availability
- Managing warehouses— Streamline distribution process with Acumatica’s Warehouse Management System (WMS)
Implementing ERP for manufacturing can be a challenging process. Getting it right has as much (or more) to do with understanding the alignment between business and manufacturing as it does with software and IT. It all has to work together, however. This is something we are good at. If you are interested in learning how Acumatica Manufacturing Edition can help your business, let’s talk.
Additional Acumatica Resources
Technology for the Mid-Sized Manufacturer
