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ERP for Small Manufacturers

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Jennie Miller

Profitably successful manufacturing and production require the ability to manage, monitor, control, adapt, and track your entire business operations. Manufacturing processes may seem challenging, but with a fully-integrated and scalable ERP software, you can scale your business and take control of production lines for maximized efficiency and increased profits.  

This is where manufacturing process automation can help. As the technology has become more advanced and accessible, an automated manufacturing system is not only restricted to making your production lines more efficient and productive. With this tool, you can automate all aspects of your manufacturing business – from inventory management to quick quoting, sales and work order creation, supply chain, and logistics and even marketing.

Pretty much anything essential for modern manufacturers to improve their productions, increase sales, and thereby, growing profit margins.   

In this article, we will dig into how a discrete manufacturer can implement and use process automation tools like MIE Trak Pro into their business and what different function these software solutions can perform to give your business growth an incredible boost.   

For this, let’s take a look into different process automation systems that can help you streamline your business operations with minimum human intervention.

Manufacturers, large or small scale, can shift to following manufacturing automation solutions for increased shop floor efficiency, cost control and enhanced production.  

  1. Order Processing:
    Be it manufacturing or sales order, it could quickly become complicated if you have to create them from the received RFQs. Moreover, order fulfilment becomes difficult when your business picks up, especially when you are a custom manufacturer.   

By automating your order process, you can easily and quickly manage and monitor your orders in real-time. Also, it allows you to track orders, adapt to order changes, manage customer information and control the prices. 

  1. Material Procurement:
    Procurement automation helps you free your workers from routine tasks that consume a lot of their time. An ERP system with vendor management and/or supplier portal components  lessens the hectic, monotonous job of the employees.

Material procurement module will allow your staff to focus on more important and necessary requirements of your manufacturing business.  

  1. Production Operations:
    Manufacturing process automation of your business operations, including shop floor and production lines will result in improved workflows with decreased manufacturing lead time. Ultimately, it will give your business bottom line – net profits – a great boost.

Moreover, using this solution is extremely important in the manufacturing industry because it allows businesses to control production bottlenecks, manage bill of materials and make well-informed decisions for business success.   

  1. Supply Chain & Logistics:
    Manufacturers and distributors can easily control and decrease the delivery time of client orders through automated supply chain and logistics. It also helps in improving the route manufacturing – especially if the manufactured items are stored in multiple locations.

Automating the supply chain will give you a greater control and monitoring over your incoming and outgoing materials and finished products in minimum time. Automation ensures quick deliveries and thereby customer satisfaction.      

  1. Customer Service:
    All the things you need to improve customer experience can be best managed through automation – from automatic responses to their queries during the off hours to cross selling and upselling. 

Process automation through an enterprise resource planning solution with a customer relationship management component will help you increase your client satisfaction rate.     

In brief, manufacturers should consider all these process automation solutions. For all these tasks and functions, it is highly advisable to adapt and implement a modern manufacturing ERP to cope with all the business challenges.

Advantages of Process Automation:
With the implementation of process automation solutions in your manufacturing business, you will experience:

  • Reduced overhead costs
    With process automation you can control your additional expenses you need to consume on different jobs and workers.
  • Improved quality control
    Manual quality checks may leave errors in the end, but with automated tools you can inspect the products fast and reliably.
  • Waste management
    Production automation allows you to have a better control on waste management. Automated procurement and supply chain help decrease time, material and resources waste.  
  • Quick customer response
    No need to make your clients wait for your replies to their requests or inquiries. Even during out of office hours, you can ensure best customer service through automate responses.    
  • Overcome labor shortage
    Automated tools like ERP production management help in risk mitigation when it comes to the dreadful impact of labor shortage on production capacity.  
  • Increased labor efficiency
    For improved production labor efficiency is the key and for this manufacturing automation tools like installing kiosks at the shop floor with updated information about work orders and resource allocation will greatly help you.   
  • Accurate, real-time data
    Now, this is what allows you to make well-informed decisions about your production planning and scheduling and all other aspects of your business. You can also make predictive analysis of production with current resource capacity and can forecast future demand.  
  • Decreased lead time
    Poor management will increase your manufacturing lead time (from production scheduling to production completion of a product). The shortcut to lower your lead times is implementation of production automation software.  
  • Well-controlled WIP
    Excessive WIP means there are bottlenecks in your manufacturing processes. You can easily manage and monitor the amount of work in progress (WIP) through automation. It helps remove the delays in the production process and thereby lower the WIP limit, and in turn decreased production bottlenecks. 

Take Away!
All these benefits will leave a combined impact on your bottom line in the form of increased savings on time, resources and money by avoiding the high cost of not streamlining and automating your manufacturing operations. 

Final Thoughts:
Manufacturing process automation system allows you to develop and implement a master production schedule, monitor shop floor performance and manage you intently and other resources automatically. In this way, you can be more focused on manufacturing processes to produce goods for growing business. Set up a process automation system like MIE Trak Pro to upgrade, manage and master your manufacturing business operations and reap all its benefits for increased production and net profits.

Source: https://www.trendz4friend.com/process-automation-system/

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