The best implementations of ERP systems are those with strategic planning and lean techniques balanced to facilitate optimal manufacturing growth.
MTO manufacturers create products to the exact specifications and orders requested by the customer – targeting fast production and high customer satisfaction in a scenario that is built on responding to variable specifications and customer expectations at a moment’s notice. Benefits of an MTO production environment include the elimination of unnecessary inventory, optimization of transportation management, elimination of the burden of over production and diminished instances of rejects and defects. For MTO manufacturers, lean techniques enable business processes that improve process flow, reduce delays and inefficiencies, and build increased customer value.
What is lean?
Lean is a western adaptation of what started out as the Toyota Production System. Viewed by many as models of efficiency and productivity, Toyota has achieved remarkable success through a singular focus on adding value. A simple enough concept, indeed, but difficult in practice because it takes a change in perception and focus that at times may seem counter intuitive. Becoming lean has been a goal of most companies over the last several years. Lean delivers what companies need in today’s highly competitive world – shorter lead times, improved quality, reduced cost, increased profit, improved productivity and better customer service. Still, not all businesses and manufacturing enterprises operate with lean best practices.
Optimizing Your ERP
The application of lean techniques to ERP system implementations and performance can allow a company to concentrate more on building new business and serving customers, rather than focusing on the mechanics of business processes. By tailoring the behavior of key processes built into an ERP system, some of the significant improvements an enterprise may realize include:
- Eliminating the need to manually review each purchase order.
- Purchase order conditions can be predefined per customer or geographical region.
- Eliminating manual order processing, thereby reducing delays and speeding up the flow of materials to production while introducing important safeguards.
- Getting rid of the manual sales order approval process, a major source of delays in processing customer orders.
- Better control over time-sensitive inventory with automatic safeguards that prevent the use of parts that have reached their expiration date.
- Eliminating the need to manually verify each shipment before release.
- Tighter control over processes that impact suppliers and customers.
In an MTO production environment, an ideal ERP solution needs to be flexible, modular and open – a comprehensive solution that delivers not only productivity, but scalability for optimal production performance.
Is your ERP solution doing all it can to power your MTO growth?
ERP systems are the central nervous system of an organization. They carry the definitions, the data, a record of the activities of the organization, and provide the measurement systems for determining where opportunities for improvement lie and for measuring progress of efforts to reduce and eliminate waste.
Is it time to optimize your ERP performance to sustain MTO growth for your manufacturing environment? CompuData ERP specialists understand the special requirements of demand-driven manufacturing and can provide best practice strategies to enhance MTO software performance. Contact CompuData today!