If you're an accounting leader for a mid-market manufacturing company, you may be wondering how to choose the best software for your business. Selecting a market leading ERP for manufacturing like Sage 100 Manufacturing and Sage 100cloud Manufacturing, for instance, fits the bill for most mid-market manufacturing environments. That's why we decided to partner with Sage and promote our manufacturing consulting expertise for over 30 years. Below we provide you with a list of features and functions that were created to help you find new software to help improve your bottom line.
Your new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) manufacturing software should help you streamline your manufacturing processes with the intent to shorten the time between receiving and shipping your customer orders. It should also help you streamline the accounting processes and gather data to provide you with valuable real-time insights to make informed decisions. Ideally, you will have dashboards and everything you need to know to help increase profits and manage costs with better insight regarding manufacturing operations and inventory control.
It's critical to have a clear picture on where your production costs occur in order to reduce the costs of doing business. It helps to break down product costs from all the various contributing factors that play into the total cost of manufacturing your product. Your software should allow you to account for not just each item, but all the activities that add to the cost of each product. Another way to reduce costs is to refine your production process and automate certain mundane, tedious, repetitive or nonproductive aspects of your business. It's also important to look for ways to automate tasks that are so important that it's critical to meet milestones or deadlines or not let them slip in the cracks.
Your software should provide you with accurate costing information to help you see wasteful costs passed on to your customer or absorbed within your company. Software such as Sage 100cloud makes it easy to see insights that lead to increased revenue and profit margins based on manufacturing KPIs.
Definitely look for a manufacturing software solution that allows you to deal with the added complexity of calculating inventory and the cost of your manufacturing goods. Software such as Sage 100cloud can be used to extract data and analyze trends, improve efficiency, and enable data-based business decisions.
Sage 100cloud can help you optimize the way you use inventory, such as providing alerts when your stock needs replenishing so you can avoid a situation where you have too much inventory (which costs money) or, even worse, not enough inventory, where you cannot fulfill the requirements of your customers.
The best ERP for manufacturing businesses should make it easy for you to stay compliant with regulations and tax laws of the areas where you do business. An all-in-one solution, which handles other tasks including finances, such as planning and production, are known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). With ERP like Sage 100cloud, your data moves between production lines and the back office, meaning you have real-time data that’s always accurate.
“The software wouldn’t let us do that” is a lament we continue to hear. One of the surprising benefits of an ERP migration is the opportunity to automate and streamline processes beyond what’s possible today. It can also give you a fresh start with your record keeping. Just like packing up to move to a new home, you tend to be more organized putting things away in your new home.
Vrakas/Blum Computer Consulting is the Number One Manufacturing Solution and Top JobOps Provider for 14 years running and a Sage Diamond partner. Our collective experience can save you time and create efficiencies. Contact Vrakas/Blum Computer Consulting today!