Long Business Systems, Inc. (LBSi) Suggests Manufacturers Can Pick Up Their Pace with Modern ERP

As we noted in recent manufacturing-oriented posts, now is the time to modernize the ERP that drives your manufacturing strategy and operations.

Manage and Integrate the Important Parts of Your Business
Your business is strong in some areas and less so in others; if you can identify the critical aspects of your operations and optimize them for speed and efficiency, your company will reap the rewards by making the right products for the right customers at the right time – all enabled by your modern ERP system.

By maintaining and sharing the master data associated with each product you manufacture, an ERP system can accelerate all areas of business and their integration points. These include:
• Operations
• Purchasing
• Planning
• Finance
• Sales
• Marketing

If your business excels in a specific area, modern ERP allows you to leverage that strength to accelerate the business. By the same token, if your company’s circumstances require less integration in certain areas, modern ERP doesn’t require an all-or-nothing approach – which is exactly the kind of flexibility SMBs have sought, but rarely found, in their ERPs.

Make and Manage Policies that Make Sense for Your Unique Business
SMBs have historically avoided systems that lack the ability to set unique business policies and ways to make policy exceptions quickly. Modern ERP, however, provides customizable wizards for establishing policies in any area as well as workflow options for rapidly handling exceptions. If an event takes place that results in a violation of established policies, the system automatically triggers a real-time notification that gets sent to management and initiates a workflow process to manage the event.

Built with manufacturers in mind, modern ERP offers these capabilities for all levels of an organization. Any system user can choose the activities they want to track and have notifications sent to the appropriate people when system indicators fall out of range. This enables manufacturers to gain more control without slowing down.

Assess and Adjust Faster
Today’s generation of ERP gives real-time insights into how your policies are affecting the business. ERP’s ability to gather data across all departments and key operational areas makes it ideally suited to report on the data for fast assessments. Using ERP, you can quickly and intuitively compose both standard and ad hoc reports based on live data and, as soon as a report is generated, your team can delve deeper into specific data and view a wide range of information surrounding each transaction (e.g., cost, pricing, etc.). You can even view and refresh live data while creating queries ─ a valuable capability during high-impact events, such as a flash sale.

Learn to Know What You Never Knew
The business intelligence capabilities of modern ERP make it easy to investigate new ways to improve your business. Users can select two or more pieces of data (or report results) and learn how they relate to one another. This type of end-to-end visibility sheds light on new opportunities to gain efficiency, reduce costs, and speed up operations. For example, consider a scenario in which a user queries the relationship between the cost of a component and the final product’s failure rate. If the system shows that the two data points have a strong correlation, the user can inform product designers and purchasing personnel so they can “spec in” and purchase the right components to avoid those with a cost that leads to high product failure rates.

About Long Business Systems, Inc.

You want a partner that will help you apply technology to solve the challenges that today’s fast-paced global marketplace has created. We understand and have personal experience with the diverse demands that manufacturers, distributors and service organizations face.

Our clients keep pace with large global companies by applying affordable technology to streamline operations, act on timely information, and accelerate profitable growth. Let us help you intelligently apply technology to your business challenges.

LBSi has been helping clients with technology and business process improvement since 1989.