Business Automation and Software Blog

Capacity planning is vital to manufacturing but knowing your organization’s required production capacity to meet ever-changing demands is quite a bit more challenging than it sounds. When you’re running close to capacity already, finding more room for production might seem impossible.

It’s not. You can find all sorts of extra time and space with a little help from SYSPRO in your manufacturing capacity planning. Here are a few things to be on the lookout for when evaluating your capacity.

Successful supply chain cannot exist without warehouses and inventory. For a warehouse to be an equally successful part of the supply chain, it needs to run efficiently. That’s where warehouse inventory management comes into play. Without it, you risk inaccurate quantities, disconnected databases, and poor product identification.

If these roadblocks sound all too familiar, we’ve assembled five tips that can help you improve your inventory management and be on your way to your most successful supply chain management yet.

Supply chain management, the management of the flow of goods and services, is a key part of a business’s forward movement and its warehouse management. It involves everything from design to planning to execution and control, to logistics and performance measurement. All of this is to ensure a business is keeping up with the supply and demand of its customers.

Technology plays a vital role in supply chain management via enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that assist in the required monitoring and controlling of costs, productivity, supplies, and inventory. Cloud-based ERP software adds an extra level of assistance by allowing remote access to information from virtually any mobile device. Now information flows easily between data sources—even disparate ones—allowing shared information and resources to augment the power of supply chain management.

If your customers are the lifeblood of your business, then a customer relationship management (CRM) system is the vascular system bringing all the customer data to the right places. With a CRM, your business can easily collect, analyze, and improve on the data you have on file. When utilized correctly, this data can improve relationships with your customers by allowing you to target the right audiences and cater to customer needs, ultimately driving sales growth.

CRM systems, like CRM for SYSPRO, collect multiple streams of customer information from conversations, communications, and interactions. That’s a lot of data! If not carefully cultivated, that data could actually be a hindrance and not a help. Check out these common data problems and how practicing CRM best practices can alleviate your data woes

It might be difficult to believe, but we’re nearly done with the first quarter of 2018. While some of us are still writing “2017” on our checks, others are already looking at what trends emerged early in 2018 and which ones will have the staying power to impact 2019.

Many of the trends have to do with software and the ability of machines to streamline processes, provide data for future predictions, and handle repetitive, manual tasks so that humans are freed up for more thought-based tasks. Manufacturing ERP systems are going to be at the center of it all in 2018. Here are some of the trends we think are going to stick around.  

Is your business looking to grow? Of course, it is. If you’re looking for ways to continue the growth of your business in 2018, you might need to look at your leadership. Is it a hierarchical style, also known as “pyramid” or “top-down”? Then you have some work to do: Studies show businesses that shift to a teamwork approach typically grow better, faster, and stronger than their hierarchy-led peers.

In other words, the better your staff works as a team, the stronger your organization will become. How do you shift from a directive-based organization to one that supports independent thinking, team creativity, and shared ownership of projects?

Accountants are a vital but sometimes misunderstood role in any organization. Far from being a stereotypical killjoy over numbers and budgets, accountants are surprisingly crucial to other departments. So much so that, believe it or not, an accountant can be a project manager’s best ally.

Project managers may be part of the marketing, creative services, information technology, or other departments. Their job is to organize, guide, and—as the title implies—manage a project from start to finish, ensuring that timelines, milestones, and budgets are met. Which is where accounting comes in.

In 2017, the public learned that Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence (AI) negotiation software project because the bots began to develop their own language that humans could not interpret. While the story was a bit sensationalized, it still got the public to really thinking about AI and the impact it has on our lives. In a world where we now say, “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google” and Alexa is practically a member of the family, AI has enabled us to live differently than ever before. Now companies are recognizing the importance of using machine learning to improve their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools.

Most of us know the speeds and limitations of our own cars. And if you were handed the keys to a Lamborghini, you could probably drive it. But would you really be able to push that car to its full potential? Would you have the knowledge you need to know how to handle the vehicle’s capabilities? A $250,000 car like that could be fairly intimidating.

We understand that feeling.

Whether you’re in charge of one line item in a large assembly line or a group of factories in the Chicago area, understanding how enterprise resource planning software such as SYSPRO can enhance supply chain management is important.

SYSPRO can change how you view your work. Instead of keeping people and plants busy, you’re using data to plan the work according to production schedules. Suddenly it becomes more about achieving goals than it is about demonstrating everyone is working hard. With data in hand, you can do more in less time than you thought possible.