4 Top Manufacturing & Distribution Challenges – Plus 3 Technologies to Beat Them!

For manufacturers, the pressure is always on – as is the push to be innovative in the face of mounting manufacturing challenges. The same is true for today’s competitive distributors, on their own journey to innovate best practices and leverage new technologies.

Manufacturers and distributors are consistently pushing to deliver products faster, with reduced costs – all the while improving business processes. With disparate systems, basic accounting applications, or sluggish Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems leading this ever-churning charge for operational greatness, the ability to succeed is compromised by very real challenges.

Today’s four top challenges – keeping manufacturers and distributors from achieving competitive goals – typically include:

1. Reduced agility to respond to rapidly changing industry conditions: How quickly are your employees able to respond to customer or vendor issues? Do they have all the information they need to make smart, timely decisions that affect your bottom line? Or are they mired in time-consuming workarounds? Will you be able to scale, expand, and choose your deployment options (on-premise or cloud) as you grow? A flexible business management solution provides functionality ready for use for manufacturers, and offers a full, customizable range of capabilities so it’s easy to adjust to your unique processes.
2. Decreased process efficiencies: Increasing competition continues to force manufacturers and distributors to reduce costs and respond to price pressures, respond faster to customer demands and speed turnaround times. These challenges are difficult to solve if you’re still relying on manual workflows and disparate systems to manage your processes. The good news is that today’s business management solutions streamline and accelerate manufacturing operations—from procurement and scheduling to shop floor, inventory, sales, and financials.
3. Limited visibility across the extended supply chain: Visibility into your business is essential and can give you an edge over your competitors. But the visibility required to compete effectively can be hindered when your systems, processes, and disparate business units are disconnected. For example, are you able to see, in real time, the status of work orders, sales orders, inventory, and resource allocation? Lack of visibility prevents you from obtaining the insights needed to make the right decisions to grow and increase profitability. A business management solution can provide you with real-time analytics, alerts, and notifications so you can respond quickly to changing business conditions.
4. Increased compliance and regulatory requirements: Regulations that affect the manufacturing industry change often. That means you need to ensure that your processes comply with those regulations, or else face often-hefty penalties. Modern business management solutions will automate and standardize those processes to ensure compliance, and they’ll also provide audit trails for documentation and reporting purposes.

Find out how GTS Distribution is facing today’s challenges head on with ERP technology. 

While the challenges detailed above can be daunting, there’s good news: By embracing the following technology trends—all of which are available with the right business management solution—you’ll be in a better position to share information more easily, speed turnaround times, and automate low-value, manual tasks.

Trending: Manufacturers, Be Proactive About Business Continuity!

Fortunately, there are technologies positioned ideally to digitize the manufacturing process – right now.

The Cloud: Collaborative problem-solving fuels innovation. More and more, manufacturers are turning to cloud-based web portals accessible via modern business management solutions that promote collaboration among employees, suppliers, partners, and customers. By providing stakeholders with easier ways to share information, knowledge, and ideas, these businesses
put themselves in better position to come up with more innovative and even disruptive products. In addition to promoting your ability to adopt and scale new capabilities as needed, flexible cloud business management solutions offer lower initial costs, faster implementation, and seamless upgrades that provide greater control over IT expenses.

Better Business Management Solutions: As a manufacturer, you accumulate large volumes of data, but converting that data into meaningful insights into your business can be a challenge. You may also want to utilize third party information and data, which could influence your demand and supply chain. The right business management solution provides integrated business intelligence and analytical tools, including exception alerts, triggers, and predictive analytics capabilities. This can bring together manufacturing data with unstructured data and various external information to deliver previously undiscovered insights. Distributors likewise benefit from advanced business intelligence.

Find out how CompuData scales Reladyne for growth with Sage Cloud Hosting.

Mobile Access, Mobile Devices…Real-Time Mobile Workforce: Mobile access to information can make all the difference to your team, enabling them to make informed decisions based on up-to-date information. Whether your team uses tablets, smartphones, or other mobile devices, mobile access to information allows your managers and staff to interact with business
systems to access real-time actionable information right from the shop floor.

Today’s advanced ERP systems are delivering faster, more flexible business management functionality capable of recording all processes within one solution for easy monitoring, providing decision makers with real-time access to actionable data and optimizing supply chain communications – all the while allowing for secure sharing of data with customers to improve lead times and services. Manufacturers will always be faced with the challenge of needing to do more, better and faster. Today, one way manufacturers are meeting current challenges head on is by embracing the transformative opportunities presented by new technologies.

Are you ready to face today’s manufacturing and distribution challenges?
Let us know!