There are a wide variety of
discrete manufacturers. Some produce only a small number of products in low
volumes and others produce many products and some of those in high volumes. But
there are some common functionalities all should look for in an ERP system:
1. Cost reduction
An ERP has to help reduce costs.
How will supplier management and purchasing tools help find components that
deliver high quality and arrive on schedule at continually lower costs? Will scheduling and job management tools help you reduce the time to manufacture and avoid costly rework?
2. CAD links
New products are in the pipeline.
Your engineers find new designs that are easier to make and ensure components
fit together just right. When the engineers find the next bread through, you
want to implement it tomorrow and not wait a long time while new bills of
material and routings are typed into the ERP. The tools exist now to copy those
data from the drawings into the ERP with amazing accuracy and speed.
3. CAM links
Today’s discrete manufacturing ERP systems can talk to your machinery. Use those tools! Get
actual production rates as jobs are in process and update your production
schedule. Update scheduled deliveries for your customers at the same time. Use
the most current rates when quoting your next bid. All these ERP tools will
help your business be more competitive and to communicate better with customers
and suppliers and in your own building at the same time.
4. Flexibility and agility
Your business is profitable today
and you have steady and satisfied customers. Tomorrow is unknown but your
discrete manufacturing ERP has to be able to adapt to tomorrow to help ensure
your business stays successful. Maybe today you specialize in short-run
production but your best customer asks you to produce a new product that
requires long-run production. Your ERP needs to handle the change. A new
material comes on the market that promises to dramatically reduce the cost of
your product. Can you change over before your competition changes – and will
your ERP change with you?
Working
with bottlenecks
There will always be bottlenecks
that control your rate of production. Your ERP should help you identify those
bottlenecks and use the drum, buffer, rope methods of TOC to get the most
production throughput possible until that constraint is resolved. Then quickly
identify the new bottleneck and schedule around it with no delay.
Discrete manufacturing ERP should also give you visibility
into available materials and capacity. They will give you the ability to
communicate with the shop floor personnel so they are working on the most
critical jobs. That communication needs to be two-way so management knows what
they are doing and have finished doing. Dashboards with
this kind of information can be available to users so that your whole
enterprise is working always as a team.
Sridevi Sridharan
| Practice Head – SAP Business ByDesign
Amitysoft Technologies Private Limited
e-Mail: sridevi@amitysoft.com
Phone: +04442035577 | Mobile: +91 9176 90 90 19
