Optimizing Inventory, Scheduling, Purchasing, and Production
Many manufacturing companies are tired of the limitations and headaches caused by manual data entry, scattered information, and outdated or overutilized systems like Excel.
Breaking free from these inefficiencies caused by fragmented or legacy systems can be difficult. With the help of Acumatica, the cloud ERP, our team at CS3 Technology is streamlining our customers’ manufacturing planning processes to achieve greater efficiency and productivity.
In this blog post, we will discuss six key points for companies looking to leverage fully integrated functionality to plan for production efficiently and cost-effectively.
Accurate Inventory Management
Accurate inventory management is critical for any business that manufactures and sells products. Poor inventory management can lead to stockouts, overstocking, and increased costs. Acumatica's inventory management capabilities are essential for effective manufacturing planning.
With Acumatica, you can track raw materials and finished good inventory levels, receive alerts when inventory levels fall below certain thresholds, and automatically generate purchase orders when inventory needs replenishment. We also maintain excellent visibility into all allocations for inventory. With tools like this inventory summary screen, we can see warehouses, bin locations, and the details of what it has been allocated for. By maintaining optimal inventory levels, you can avoid disruptions to your production process and keep your customers happy!
This is just one example of the drillable reporting you can easily view in Acumatica.
Advanced Planning and Scheduling
Inefficient production scheduling causes longer lead times, reduced productivity, and increased labor costs, which can result in missed deadlines and lost sales. Acumatica's advanced planning and scheduling capabilities enable you to optimize your production schedule and maximize the utilization of your resources.
Production Order Generation: Automatically generate production orders based on demand signals such as sales orders, forecasts, and reorder points. This feature helps ensure production is initiated on time to meet customer requirements.
Production Scheduling: Create and manage production schedules based on available resources, work centers, and routing sequences. You can assign operations, set priorities, and allocate resources to plan and coordinate production activities efficiently.
Work Center Management: Define and manage work centers, which represent the physical locations or departments where production operations occur. You can assign resources, define capacities, track utilization, and monitor the progress of work center operations.
These features enable you to improve efficiency, reduce lead times, and increase on-time delivery. The true finite-capacity scheduling power of Acumatica ensures that you can boost your efficiency even with today’s challenging labor market.
Bill of Materials (BOM)
With Acumatica's BOM capabilities, you can create and manage your BOMs, track the availability of materials and components, and monitor the costs (both material and labor) associated with each BOM. This enables you to ensure that you have the necessary materials on hand to meet production demands and to make informed decisions about the cost and profitability of your products. With Acumatica, you have these features and more.
Multi-Level BOM: Acumatica supports the creation of multi-level bills of materials, allowing you to define complex hierarchical relationships between parent and child items. This enables you to accurately represent the components and subassemblies required to produce finished goods.
Routing Operations: In Acumatica, you can define comprehensive routing steps that outline the specific operations for different work centers, even outside processing required to assemble a finished product, providing a clear roadmap for efficient production execution.
BOM Versions and Revisions: Acumatica allows you to create multiple versions and revisions of a BOM. This feature is beneficial when managing changes and updates to your product structure over time. You can easily create new versions or revisions, compare them, and track the history of changes made to your BOMs.
BOM Templates: Acumatica enables you to create BOM templates, which serve as predefined structures for specific product lines or configurations. This feature streamlines the creation of new BOMs by providing a starting point with preconfigured components, quantities, and relationships.
Enhanced Reporting: Reporting features like the Where Used in BOM tool allows you to quickly identify all the BOMs in which a specific component or subassembly is used. This feature provides valuable insights into the impact of changes. Additionally, Acumatica's Visual BOM functionality offers an intuitive visual representation of your BOM structure, making it easy to understand the relationships between components and subassemblies. Lastly, the Mass Change feature in Acumatica allows you to efficiently update or replace multiple items or components in your BOM simultaneously, saving time and effort by eliminating the need for manual changes.
Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
MRP is a critical component of manufacturing planning that enables companies to plan their material purchasing and production requirements by considering all sources of demand, along with lead times. With Acumatica's MRP capabilities, you can create detailed production plans, identify the materials needed to fulfill those plans, and generate purchase orders and production orders. This enables you to optimize your inventory levels and reduce the risk of stockouts or delayed production.
The MRP Display screen provides clear insight into purchase, transfer, and production suggestions. Sort and filter by inventory, lead times, and much more!
Real-Time Data Analysis
Acumatica's real-time data analysis capabilities enable you to monitor your manufacturing processes and make informed decisions based on up-to-date information. Track production progress, monitor quality control metrics, and analyze production costs with drillable dashboard reporting. Live data lets you spend your time analyzing data and identifying opportunities to improve your manufacturing processes, rather than spending manual effort to compile data from multiple disconnected systems and spreadsheets!
Dashboards are just one of the native reporting tools available in Acumatica. Live data, in highly configurable available formats, provides valuable insights into your operations.
Integration with Other Business Functions
Acumatica is a true end-to-end solution, providing you with all other necessary business functions such as CRM, sales order management, and accounting (AP, AR, GL, banking). Thus, you can streamline your business processes and achieve greater efficiency in all areas of your operations.
For example, you can automatically generate invoices for completed production orders, track sales order progress, and manage your potential sales pipeline within the same system used for purchasing and production. Acumatica's unlimited user capability enables seamless collaboration within your entire organization, ensuring that everyone can access and update the system in real time with live data, fostering efficient communication and synchronization across all departments.
To see how Acumatica can be used to manage all aspects of your business, click here. to view our recent webinar.
Closing:
CS3 Technology offers systems that provide the crucial requirements for manufacturers seeking to grow and become more efficient in today’s complicated marketplace. If you are interested in transforming your operations with Acumatica ERP and leveraging our decades of ERP and HCM software experience, please contact us.
