Most explanations of MRP stop at the definition: material requirements planning determines what to buy and make, and when. That is true, and not very useful if you are trying to understand why MRP just told you to release a purchase order today for material you will not use for three weeks, or why it […]
Food and beverage manufacturing does not behave like assembling a product from parts. A bicycle factory never makes 7.25 bicycles. A bakery, a dairy, or a beverage plant routinely produces a batch that yields a little more or less than expected, substitutes an ingredient when a lot runs short, splits one run across several lot […]
A bill of materials tells you what goes into a product. A routing tells you how it gets made: which operations, in what order, on which work centers, and how long each one takes. Most manufacturers put serious effort into their bills of material, because a missing component stops a job. Routings get less attention, […]
Every plant has a production schedule. In some it is a finite-capacity plan in the ERP. In many it is a whiteboard, a spreadsheet that one person maintains, and a supervisor who knows which jobs are really hot. The whiteboard works until it doesn’t: a customer pulls in a date, a machine goes down, material […]
At month-end, the cost report says the plant ran $14,000 over standard. Nobody can say exactly why. Purchasing says material prices went up. Production says the standards are wrong. Accounting says labor was charged to the wrong jobs. Everyone may be partly right, and that is the problem: a single variance number tells you that […]
Every manufacturer has money sitting on the shop floor. Material has been issued but not yet turned into a finished product. Labor has been spent on jobs that have not shipped. Parts are out at the plater, in a queue in front of the CNC, or half-assembled on a bench. That is work in process, […]
What QuickBooks does well, where it runs out for manufacturers and distributors, the signs you have outgrown it, and how to plan the move to ERP.
What manufacturing ERP software is, the capabilities that matter, how ERP differs from MRP and MES, and how to evaluate vendors using real production scenarios.
Distribution looks simple from the outside. Buy products. Keep them in stock. Sell them for more than you paid. Ship them to the customer. The reality is considerably more complicated. A distributor may manage thousands of SKUs across multiple warehouses, buy and sell products in different units of measure, maintain customer-specific pricing agreements, allocate limited […]
Cloud ERP is enterprise resource planning software that is hosted and managed in the cloud and accessed over the internet. Like any ERP system, it connects the core processes a business uses to operate: accounting, inventory, purchasing, sales, order fulfillment, warehouse management, reporting, and more. The difference is that instead of installing and maintaining the […]
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