It’s Monday, and your warehouse manager is on vacation. Your assistant manager should be in charge but calls in sick. Soon, production has used so much of a single item that inventory level is becoming dangerously low, putting Friday’s commitment to an important customer at risk. Lead time delivery doesn’t support the schedule. There’s expediting, but that will send your margin down the drain.

If you’re in operations, manufacturing, or supply chain, this is garden-variety stress.

Business process automation (BPA) enables manufacturers to remove both simple and complex steps from their processes, which streamlines operations and results in efficiency. BPA shouldn’t be confused with industrial automation (IA), which is also widely found in manufacturing companies, as they are quite different.

In a recent post, we discussed the value of implementing electronic Kanban (E-Kanban) into your modern ERP system. In this post, we’ll discuss some differences between manufacturing replenishment based on Kanban and MRP.

Which of your products should you offer on special? Which should be marked up? How should you bid on that major RFP received by your sales team? If you can’t answer these types of questions in a matter of minutes, you’re falling behind competitors who manage inventory with better ERP systems.

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays – which means busy, busy, busy! Now’s the time to start taking small escapes from the hustle and bustle so you don’t get burnt out.

And we’d love to help! We invite you to relax and learn from some of our best resources.

As your manufacturing or distribution business grows, your processes become increasingly complicated. To remain competitive, you need to develop workflows that are supported by your ERP. 

Workflows that are supported by ERPs ensure employee consistency, meaning employees will:

• Know how tasks are done
• Know how their tasks fit into the overall process

Because every business thrives on the data its employees collect while performing their daily tasks, it follows that the easier it is to capture and share data, the more effective your business decisions will be.

That's the essence of ERP’s value.

You don’t have time to sift through numerous reports each month to determine the health of your business. Instead, you should use the automated alerting capabilities within ERP to know when operations are falling out of range.

While your CRM and ERP don’t absolutely need to be integrated to gain visibility into your sales pipeline, integration surely helps. It’s good to know your customer’s history (ERP) when providing them a new quote (CRM). It’s also good to know pipeline (CRM) and predicting capacity by open orders (ERP) more accurately. Let’s delve into the quoting process as it occurs in one of today’s modern ERP systems.