Best Manufacturing ERP – Forbes Consultant

The greatest benefits of manufacturing ERP are often realized when companies purchase solutions tailored to their individual needs. However, in general, ERPs can help manufacturers maintain cash flow, improve operations, predict which decisions will advance company goals, manage inventory more effectively, create supply chain visibility and warehouse efficiency, create positive customer experiences, and close high-quality sales.

Here’s a closer look at each of these manufacturing ERP benefits:

1. Protect your cash flow

Manufacturing ERP frees up money by helping with inventory-level management and faster tracking of invoices. The inventory measures ensure that unnecessary items are not stuck in storage. Doing so will keep your money from getting tied up in excessive storage costs. Manufacturing ERP connects sales and invoices, providing visibility into what customers have paid. Instant tracking ensures funds are not held back on billing.

2. Improve your production operations

Manufacturing ERP integrates all your resource planning systems, giving you a 360-degree view of your resources, employees, addresses, processes and goals. As you connect your internal and external teams and processes, you gain visibility into where needs are unmet so you can address bottlenecks before they occur. This holistic view also reveals trends, failures and challenges to employ quick fixes or continuous improvements.

3. Predictive smart decision making

There are endless possibilities as to how the predictive capabilities of manufacturing ERP can benefit your business. For example, you can analyze the market to identify trends or conditions that may affect how much product you can move after post-production. This ensures that you don’t produce more than you can sell, thereby losing money. You can forecast expenses against income to make sure you can adequately cover them.

4. Easily manage your inventory

Manufacturing ERP helps you manage inventory. For example, it helps manage replenishment by defining your needs and putting processes and automation in place to meet them. It also lets you keep track of where your inventory is, keeping a supplier database complete with your purchase history for easy reordering.

5. Get real-time visibility into your supply chain

In addition to being able to connect all of your internal teams, you can also connect all of the locations involved in the supply chain. For example, you can connect your warehouses, branches and suppliers. In doing so, you can streamline the supply chain process and ensure that all materials arrive when and where they are needed, reducing unnecessary costs such as storage costs.

6. Create efficiency and cost savings in your warehouse

When it comes to managing a warehouse, time is money. Dealing with inefficient or disorganized warehouse processes often means you have to pay employees for your chaos instead of their skills. ERP helps ensure that billable time is not automatically wasted. For example, integrate it with your automated machinery, then use it to print labels and barcodes, know when your stock is low, and order bin refills.

7. Create winning customer experiences

Producers are selling what they produce. Creating a winning customer experience will help them sell more now and in the future. ERP can unify all your sales touchpoints to create a consistently great experience for customers no matter how they engage with your brand.

For example, it can help you target customers who are most prone to switching loyalties to win their hearts anew. It also helps create a valuable customer experience by telling you how much you can lower your prices while maintaining profit margins.

8. Create efficiency through automation

Manufacturing ERP can help you with report generation, alerts that tell you how to keep your production and distribution processes on track, and automation of input and operational tasks. Because it unifies all of your important operating systems, it’s easy to see where automation can be helpful, then automate middle-of-the-road tasks. In this way, they create efficiency through company-wide collaboration.

9. Create sales efficiencies to close high-quality sales

When manufacturing ERP connects sales and manufacturing teams, you can better close sales with high customer satisfaction. Your sales team, for example, can identify the items you have in stock to make sure what you’re selling is what you’re selling, then process payments directly from your ERP. You can also automatically print carrier labels to ensure on-time delivery and efficiently process orders to ensure seamless carrier communication.