Manufacturers are at the mercy of their workflow processes. If you have an effective workflow and meet the requirements and volume of your valued customer base, you’re able to expand your business. Fall behind the curve, and your business, and product, become obsolete.
That’s why many organizations with specific manufacturing processes are looking for ways to enhance productivity and efficiency in a cost-effective manner.
If your manufacturing operation uses outdated and archaic systems, you may find it hard to effectively balance growing competition, supply chain issues, and fluctuation in demand. You need to consolidate all your processes in an intelligent and centralized system that caters to your unique business needs. You need enterprise resource planning software, or ERP.
ERP has the power and capacity to completely overhaul your manufacturing process to skyrocket productivity and positively affect your bottom line.
But how does ERP optimize different stages in the production process? Let’s take a deeper dive:
Benefits For Production
ERP allows you to manage daily schedules and offers a database of centralized information across the business to utilize every resource efficiently. This fosters strategic planning, enhanced speed, and better synchronization.
This allows manufacturing costs and inventory waste to decrease when implementing a just-in-time inventory model.
With new data and analytics providing you with actionable intel, you’ll increase productivity to new heights.
Benefits For Sales
The benefits of ERP are not simply limited to the production process and the reduction of manufacturing costs. ERP helps businesses achieve goals quicker and allows a streamlined process to help decision-makers view various intel.
Some aspects of business benefits include:
Fast Payments
Effective invoicing saves time and money and increases available cash flow.
Complete Cost Control
ERPs combine cost components such as transportation, storage, manufacturing, and inventory and can be shared with accounting seamlessly.
Ordering Efficiency
Your ERP will be able to track your inventory in real-time, allowing for just-in-time principles that will lower your waste and reduce your necessary storage space. This eliminates stagnation in the manufacturing process.
Accounting Efficiency
Combine financials from manufacturing, sales, marketing, and production all in one place.
Benefits For HR
With an ERP, you’ll be able to implement an HR module that allows managers to use the HR database to assign tasks and manage the workforce in a more streamlined way.
With quicker communication between employee and employer, unnecessary hoops no longer need to be jumped through, in turn, improving the relationship between both parties.
It also allows HR to share training information so that employees can better function in their daily roles and develop their skills further. HR can send video and text-based materials to employees with ease.
An ERP allows managers to skip the manual gathering of data from various sources and instead live within the HR Module for maximum productivity.
Benefits For Customer Relationships
With an ERP, you’ll bolster customer relations by delivering your product faster, limiting human-based ordering errors, improving your customer service, and lowering costs.
You’ll be able to share orders among various departments, limiting the need for interdepartmental memos or emails to take action on problems that arise. Orders will be filled and shipped on time, improving customer satisfaction.
An ERP can also give employees a customized dashboard, allowing the customer service rep to have easy access to the most critical information necessary to communicate with the customer effectively. ERP integrates effortlessly with your customer relationship management software (CRM) for a seamless experience.
Benefits For Management
Both product inventory management and materials management go a long way to ensure your business has the appropriate materials to complete the manufacturing process.
How the product is transported to customers is equally important. If the two management systems are separated, difficulties arise in communication and, in turn, creation and deployment.
ERP software allows the combination of this type of management and processes such as tracking materials, billing of materials, and shipping times can be updated automatically.
This reduces human error to make sure that materials always arrive when needed.