ERP in Manufacturing Can Increase Throughput
Manufacturing ERP Software Can Also Help Minimize Costs
May 23, 2009
MRP - Materials Requirement Planning - was a precursor of today's ERP manufacturing software, which covers much more than materials planning. The manufacturing module helps with all stages from product design and engineering through production scheduling and work-in-process monitoring to quality control. It can also interface with supply chain and customer relationship modules, providing complete control over the core business processes.
ERP in Manufacturing Processes
Manufacturing is typically viewed as shop floor operations that convert raw materials into finished products. ERP manufacturing modules, however, view it as much broader and incorporate tools to help with Product Design, Production Engineering, Production Planning & Scheduling, Real-time Monitoring of shop floor operations and Quality Control. We now look at these functionalities briefly.
Manufacturing ERP Software: Design Functionalities
- Product Design: The design process involves developing a product to meet specific needs using available technologies. The final product must meet performance, usability, safety and optimal cost parameters. With the massive data in its databases and speed of processing, ERP can provide just the right kind of data, and also help complete the design process more effectively and faster.
- Production Engineering: Translating the design into manufacturing requirements including Bill of Materials and Routing Information is not only quicker, but can conform to best practices using modern ERP Manufacturing modules.
ERP as a Manufacturing Planning and Operational Resource
- Production Planning & Scheduling: This is the function that considers available resources and existing constraints, and develops plans and schedules that maximize shop floor throughput. The powerful modeling facilities of ERP modules can help immensely with this complex task.
- Mobile Transactions: Mobile transactions using radio-frequency devices and PDAs can capture data from the field and transfer them efficiently to the main data repositories. Data entry requirements and delays in availability of reports can be considerably reduced as a result.
- Monitoring Shopfloor Operations: The up-to-data data capture facilities and extensive analytical modules of ERP manufacturing software helps real-time or near real-time monitoring of emerging bottlenecks and variances from plans. Interfaces with SCM modules, for example, can help monitor timely delivery of supplies by vendors.
- Quality Control: Monitoring critical quality data such as yield, defects and supplier performance help achieve more effective quality control.
- Speedy Adaptation to Changes: Even the best of plans are subject to unforeseen changes, and ERP software's capabilities to quickly rework plans and schedules, including routing, can help minimize the throughput impact of the sudden changes.
The overall result will be higher throughput, better quality control and reduced costs, which are the key objectives of manufacturing operations.
Manufacturing ERP software has robust and extensive capabilities that enable it to help with all issues involved in utilizing resources to maximize shop floor throughput, at the same time ensuring higher quality and lower costs. The interfaces with other modules such as supply chain management, and the best practice routines help control all these aspects far more effectively than possible with traditional software tools.
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