Automate Complex Manufacturing Resource Planning

Your manufacturing company’s ability to deliver orders on time depends on a lot of moving parts. Manufacturing resource planning is used to forecast inventory balance based on your raw materials purchases, work-in-progress inventory of internally manufactured components, as well as externally sourced components. Here are the ways that you can manage the complexity of your manufacturing process and get full control of your entire cost structure and cash flow planning.

Sales Forecasting

Shipping 100% of your orders on time requires finely tuned, connected manufacturing resource planning, also referred to as MRP. A robust MRP app such as AppComputing will help you ensure you have sufficient raw materials inventory, as well as outsourced components to build the items in time to fulfill all your orders.

For example, the system will look at sales forecasting to see that it’s anticipated that your team will sell 100 units and ship 100 units next month. You can also add a secondary set of units beyond what is required for order fulfillment to handle needs such as warranty claims or promotions. Now, you can confidently schedule manufacturing to produce enough units for delivery without guessing.

Advanced BOM Capability

It’s typical for your products to be comprised of several components. Another feature that automates a complex tracking and planning process is AppComputing’s bill of materials (BOM) functionality. The system makes it easy to track all your components and plan your required raw materials inventory to meet demand. You can drill into each component in your BOM to plan needs for internal component raw materials, as well as components sourced from outside suppliers.

For example, if you manufactured cars, you could track your purchases of four tires and one spare per car from an outsourced vendor. Your car BOM will also have components that you manufacture in house, like frames and engines. The system will automatically calculate the inventory balance over time so you can monitor your inventory reserve closely.

Procurement Processing

Those internally manufactured components are made up of raw materials that must be procured. You can see and manage all of these components and raw materials easily inside the system. The system makes it easy to import data from external data sources such as input ratio and conversion ratio.

Plan inventory needs based on raw materials required and work-in-progress inventory of internally manufactured components. Multi-layer planning data of external purchases and internal manufacturing rolls up to finished goods.

Cost Reconciliation

Review the entire manufacturing data for a particular item. In the Review & Commit tab, you’ll see all the data automatically captured and calculated to show you:

• Unit demand
• Unit forecasting
• Unit manufacturing
• Unit balance
• Statement of costs

Cost reconciliation of those multiple layers of expenses such as labor, overhead and materials is made simpler by the app. It will automatically capture and calculate all your manufacturing costs and expenses and compare it to your standard costing already in your system to determine if you have an overage or are running under standard costing. This calculation is instantly updated to your financial statements without any additional data entry.

Connect the ERP

Automate your entire manufacturing process with complex, seamless, multi-component, multi-layer MRP. Connecting your MRP to your ERP makes it easy to use the latest data in your planning. For example, you can import historical data into your MRP. Any forward-looking data such as sales projection data is used by the MRP to forecast manufacturing capacity, resources, and costs and then update the financial statements to keep them in synch.

Get Started Today

If you’re still using Excel for budget analysis and modeling or need better internal controls to create consistency and efficiency, contact the experts at AppComputing today. We’ve helped companies just like yours achieve granular visibility with increased accuracy and tighter controls, and we can help you too. Contact us today to see a demo of BudgetEngine and find out how to automate your retail commerce budget planning.