Keeping an Eye at Each End of the Supply Chain and All Points Between
Knowing where your inventory is at any given moment is crucial to proactively identifying issues as well as opportunities early on. The great thing about manufacturing is that every step is linked, yet that can easily turn a small problem into a big one if you don’t have visibility into where that problem began.
To find alternate materials, change production schedules, and notify customers without any major hiccups, integrated ERP and logistics management is a must and can provide additional benefits in four major areas of your supply chain:
- Supplier Shipments: By monitoring supplier shipments and transit time, you can ensure accurate planning and consistent delivery performance quickly, before anything happens.
- Field Personnel: By capitalizing on mobile technology with scanners and implementing barcodes to deliver the information to field personnel while seamlessly communicating back to the office, you can improve efficiency as well as keep the field up to speed at any given time.
- Order Shipments: Promising accurate order shipment and delivery dates at the line item level to customers is absolutely a reality when based on current and future availability. An integrated ERP solution provides that level of insight making the future less intimidating and more opportunistic.
- Drop Shipments: An integrated solution also allows you to manage drop shipments with confidence and monitor vendor shipments to ultimately ensure customer satisfaction.
With insight into these four areas, you can meet customer expectations while avoiding unnecessary downtime as well as expensive overtime. For example, we worked with an auto parts manufacturer that had been in business for years and was getting by with an aging accounting solution that wasn’t connected with any of their other systems. We implemented an integrated ERP system, and their employees can now use one easy-to-understand system to track all related data as items flow through the supply chain. Sales people can even access inventory and shipping information from their mobile phones to estimate delivery dates while they are in the customer’s office.
We have many examples similar to this in the eBook, “How Today’s Manufacturers are Taking Control of Materials, Inventory, and Manufacturing Costs from Order to Delivery”. Read it so you can gain visibility up and down your supply chain.