Every successful manufacturing company reaches a point when growth and efficient operations are no longer possible. Or, not possible without some serious technology stack soul-searching. Having been at this for quite a while, we’ve seen it all:
Operating on a legacy system that no longer receives significant improvements or support.
Spreadsheets for quoting, material planning, production management, purchasing, and accounting.
Employees who are overwhelmed with several software systems, each with their own learning curve.
No true sense of profitability due to limited job cost visibility and nonexistent KPIs.
Missed revenue opportunities due to lack of functionality or lack of usability.
If you are experiencing any (or all) of the pains listed above, it might be time for you to consider implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. A modern system can remove barriers to success by transforming your operations in the Cloud.
While there are many options for manufacturing ERP systems, we highly recommend Acumatica ERP due to its superior usability, powerful functionality, and future-proof platform. In this article, we highlight ways our customers are streamlining their operations with Acumatica, the Cloud ERP.
1. Proactive Decision Making
Live data metrics are highly instrumental in ensuring that the ship is steering in the right direction. Rather than wait for the “post-mortem” assessment, the up-to-date data Acumatica offers allows you to be proactive with your decision-making by identifying crucial action items before they become problems.
To be fair, tons of solutions offer live data. However, considering how the data is displayed is equally important. With Acumatica’s user-friendly platform and native reporting tools, it’s just a matter of choosing what you want to view and how you want to view it!
Dashboards are one of the native reporting tools inside Acumatica that can keep you on top of all areas of your business. Use the out of the box reports, or easily configure your own thanks to Acumatica’s low/no-code framework.
While data is important in all areas of your business, we find that today’s supply chain disruptions have only exacerbated the always-present difficulty of knowing what to purchase and when. With full integration throughout sales, purchasing, production, and service management, Acumatica’s MRP functionality keeps you on top of your purchasing and production decisions with automated suggestions based on reorder points, sales demand, production requirements, and forecasts.
Automate Manual Tasks
During an ERP implementation, we focus on helping our clients identify manual tasks that they can automate and schedule at their desired frequency. Our goal is to help you do more with less, which, as we all know, is increasingly important in today’s competitive job market.
So what does automation “look like” on a daily basis? Among other things, the Acumatica platform allows you to:
Create approval maps to automatically route documents (POs, AP Bills, BOMs, ECRs, etc.) to the correct approver.
Send email, text, and mobile push notifications based on the triggers you define.
Utilize shipping carrier integration to rate shop and pull in tracking information and shipping labels without leaving the Acumatica interface.
Schedule tasks using processing screens, such as automatically creating shipments each morning based on available inventory or automatically routing sales leads to salespeople based on lead conditions.
Import your bills of material directly from your CAD software, creating all new subassemblies and component items.
Eliminate Duplicate Data Entry
An all-in-one system like Acumatica eliminates the need for multiple systems that often fail to communicate with each other. In this scenario, duplicate data entry and manual uploads can bog down your team and crowd out higher-value tasks.
Imagine the possibilities when you can manage the sales pipeline, develop quotes, issue and receive POs, build, ship, invoice, and manage service appointments all in the same system! Less data entry means less chance for errors and more time to help customers, contact vendors, manage the production floor, and ensure the sales pipeline is full of opportunities!
We know that Acumatica’s functionality can provide you the ability to manage all your operations from sales through service. Yet we also understand that there may be additional systems that you require or just can’t live without, such as your CAD software.
Thankfully, Acumatica has pre-built connectors available and a growing marketplace of integrated solutions that offer unique functionality that you might not find in any ERP system. Do you need a specific integration that isn’t yet available? We can achieve that as well with Acumatica’s powerful REST and SOAP APIs.
Supercharge Your Accounting
One of the biggest needs we see among manufacturers is better visibility on job costs. Without accurate cost information, it’s highly difficult to identify profitability and inform pricing. Acumatica solves this problem by offering multiple options for easily issuing labor and material to jobs, allowing the flexibility for your team to transact the way that makes sense for your unique business and ensuring inventory levels and job costs are up to date.
At its core, Acumatica is a powerful accounting platform. Here are some other examples of functionality that our manufacturing customers leverage on a daily basis:
Full project accounting capabilities for complex or lengthy jobs.
Automated intercompany transactions.
Advanced expense management for sales and service employees who are on the go.
Document recognition engine for those with a high volume of AP bills.
Bank feeds and auto-matching capabilities.
Deferred revenue, sales tax, currency management, and more!
Support Your Entire Team
Acumatica is a true cloud product, which means that as long as you have a device and an internet connection, you will be able to access your data. Whether your team is logging in from their work computer, checking sales leads from the Acumatica mobile app, barcode scanning to receive products from a Warehouse Management device, or even clocking into a production job from a tablet, Acumatica has you covered!
Unlike most competitors, Acumatica offers an unlimited user model. This means you can add employees as users without incurring additional costs, so no more picking and choosing who gets access and who doesn't. The way we see it, software is only as good as those who use it! Why not leverage Acumatica’s user roles and access controls to provide your entire organization with the data and functionality necessary to streamline and boost efficiency?
We do understand that every company has employees with a variety of technological fluency. Actual users consistently rank Acumatica as the most user-friendly system in the mid-market!
Closing:
CS3 Technology offers systems that provide the crucial requirements for manufacturers seeking to grow and become more efficient in today’s complicated marketplace. If you are interested in transforming your operations with Acumatica ERP and leveraging our decades of ERP and HCM software experience, please contact us.
