Why You Need an ERP for Manufacturing
If you’re in manufacturing, you need a manufacturing platform — seems obvious, right?
Manufacturing is huge category that covers how finished goods are created and produced, and particularly the machinery needed to accomplish that. Production takes a magnifying glass to that concept, turning raw materials into finished goods that you can sell.
In both discrete or process manufacturing, efficient production requires a ton of moving parts to work cohesively, from machines to supply chain orders to workers to schedules. Without software to manage those diverse pieces, you’ll struggle with higher costs, slower timelines, errors in capacity estimates and more.
Yet manufacturing solutions on their own can be a bottleneck to production. They often:
- Lack complex workflow management tools
- Offer limited manufacturing tools, such as cost calculators that can’t provide a breakdown of individual project costs
- Exist in a vacuum separate from your other business process tools
- Rely on third-party integrations for other tools, which are slower or prone to failure
In other words, manufacturing platforms on their own are limited. For businesses looking to scale, an ERP is vital.
The problem? Legacy ERPs.
Picture your ideal state of manufacturing. Is it full of manual work, complex integrations across multiple systems and a cumbersome platform that creates as many problems as it solves?
Probably not.
But that’s the reality of manufacturing with traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. It’s one of the reasons many growing businesses have been reluctant to transition from smaller-scale manufacturing solutions to a full-fledged ERP.
The solution? Cloud-based ERPs.
Cloud ERP solutions encompass more than just the foundational manufacturing process. They pull in more comprehensive production needs and tools, from inventory management to sales integrations to accounting. Typical manufacturing software, even if they’re based in the cloud, simply can’t cover all those business needs.
There is a catch, however: some cloud ERPs can do more than others when it comes to manufacturing. That’s why it’s essential to look for a provider that offers a complete cloud ERP suite, including advanced manufacturing capabilities.
Moreover, elite cloud ERP suites can also integrate directly with other business tools, such as XERO or HubSpot, via open APIs. These holistic solutions essentially provide you with a tech stack that covers all inventory, production, shipping, marketing, sales and accounting needs.
Without these partnerships and advanced manufacturing management, cloud ERPs aren’t a complete solution for business management. Only comprehensive cloud ERP suites can truly rival the functionality of legacy ERPs — with none of the downsides.
Meet DEAR’s Comprehensive Cloud ERP Manufacturing Suite
With our latest upgrade to our material requirements planning (MRP) tool, DEAR’s cloud ERP solution now offers a truly comprehensive suite of manufacturing tools. This solution was created to help you accomplish key production goals and go from managing to optimizing your manufacturing.
MRP is a planning tool geared specifically to assembly and production that allows each manufacturing unit to tell its supplier what parts it requires and when it requires them. It’s created to tackle the problem of “dependent demand,” where you need to know the number of finished products to determine how many components are required.
Specifically, it’s designed to enable you to:
- Implement demand-driven manufacturing, which helps you execute manufacturing orders efficiently and capture the benefits of inventory management
- Organize a smooth production process capable of timely delivery of finished goods
- Manage the capacity of all your production resources
- Plan out all the components you need for production
- Control and schedule each step of production
- Automate and visualize the planning and scheduling process
- Enable complete supply chain management
MRP rounds out our manufacturing suite — here’s how.
Any complex manufacturing requires tools that can handle complexity, particularly the advanced planning and scheduling functions that come with our MRP module.
This upgrade has elevated our cloud ERP solution into a truly comprehensive suite of tools and closed any gaps in our manufacturing model. You can now evolve your manufacturing from a simple production process to a fully planned and optimized process with finite control over capacity and resources, including complex workflows like logistic paths.
Our manufacturing module now includes these functions:
1. Master Production Schedule (MPS), which accounts for known demand and forecasts products that will be created.
2. Explosion of Bill of Materials, which includes production time as a resource and includes the multiple steps required to complete a production run; the levels of production are “exploded” from the MPS down to final assembly.
3. Inventory netting, where any stock on hand is subtracted from the required production resources you identified through explosion; this determines the quantity of each item you need to begin your manufacturing.
4. Offsetting, which determines when manufacturing should start so that the finished items are available when required and leaves a “lead time.”
5. Creation of purchase and production orders, which automatically account for the quantities and timing of resources that you need.
6. Creation of stock transfers to ensure your materials are where they need to be
These processes all speak automatically to one another. The end result is that before you begin production, a complete list of requirements and timings can be automatically ordered from your outside suppliers. That means no more backtracking, coming up short or running manual calculations to determine how to best complete your production run.
Together, these benefits transform your manufacturing process.
With all of these capabilities packed into one powerful software module — which is fully connected to DEAR’s broader ERP suite of solutions, including inventory management — you’ll see tremendous return on investment in your production process.
Increased control and oversight helps you deliver high-quality products, on time, with a higher operating margin. Leveraging these features to implement demand-driven marketing will help you reduce expenses, particularly in inventory.
Best of all, our cloud ERP solution enables advanced manufacturing that’s easy to use, with a low barrier to entry. You can run production seamlessly and reduce costs without deep knowledge in economics theory or a heavy investment of management time.
DEAR’s cloud ERP solution is ushering in a new age of collecting, storing, managing and analysing business data. With this upgrade comes greater efficiency, cost insights, stock control and reporting, to name a few. And our latest manufacturing tools elevate our cloud ERP solution to be truly on par with the capabilities of legacy ERPs.