How bad is the dehumanizing environment in some manufacturing companies? Consider the recent article in The Atlantic, In Praise of Short-Term Thinking, which states, “Machines do replace humans. In fact, replacing humans is often entirely the point.”

In managing your business during this time of sustained economic growth and low unemployment rates, you know the top challenge: retaining good employees.

WiSys Warehouse Management System integrates seamlessly with SAP Business One, so if you need to receive, put away, issue, produce, warehouse, and ship inventory items, this powerful solution is the answer.

Certain manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to manage and track finished products, WIP, and raw materials from original suppliers to end customers. This is called “traceability,” and compliance is largely due to numerous regulatory agencies that enforce laws for public safety. These include the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

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.

Macola 10 (M10) is a purpose-built ERP meant for SMB manufacturers and wholesale distributors. A more modern ERP system that offers extreme flexibility, M10 is deployable on premise, compatible with Windows operating systems, and accessible from any device at any time.

If you run a small or midsized manufacturing business, you know how difficult it is to transform operations and position your company for significant growth – that’s why our recently published case study about Rhode Island-based Denison Pharmaceuticals is a must read.

I meet companies every day that are limping along with older enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and think new will always be better. There’s no question that ERP capabilities now blow away what was available 10 years ago and annihilate what was available 20 years ago – but that’s purely from a technical function standpoint. Way more important is your organization’s capability.

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.