Direct material and direct labor are easy to see on a job. Overhead is not. Rent, utilities, equipment depreciation, maintenance, supervisors, quality staff, and shop supplies all support production, but none of them belongs to a single job. Manufacturers assign them to products through an overhead rate. Get the rate right and product costs, quotes, […]
Most ERP buyers spend months comparing software and a few days reading the contract. That is backwards. The software you choose will run your business for a decade, and the contract decides what it costs over that decade, what happens when you grow or shrink, what you get if the system goes down, and whether […]
Plenty of distributors and manufacturers still run their business on an IBM midrange system: the platform people still call the AS/400, now IBM i on IBM Power servers. It has earned its reputation. These systems are stable, fast, and often run for decades with little downtime. Many run packaged ERP built for the platform; many […]
Many successful distributors and manufacturers run on software they built themselves. It started as a sensible decision: nothing on the market fit, a talented developer was on staff, and the system grew alongside the business. Years later it knows every quirk of how the company works, and that is exactly the problem. It depends on […]
Picking is usually the most labor-intensive job in a distribution warehouse, and often the largest single share of warehouse labor cost. How you pick, one order at a time, many orders at once, by zone, or in scheduled waves, decides how far pickers walk, how many errors reach customers, and how many orders ship on […]
Every manufacturer has to decide when production starts: before the customer orders, or after. Make-to-stock builds ahead of demand so products are ready to ship. Make-to-order builds after an order arrives. Assemble-to-order builds components ahead and finishes on order. Engineer-to-order designs the product after the order. Each choice changes lead time, inventory, cash, planning, and […]
Every manufacturer changes its products. The question is whether changes are controlled or simply happen. A controlled engineering change has a reason, an approval, an effective date or quantity, and a plan for everything it touches: open work orders, inventory of the old part, open purchase orders, routings, and documents. An uncontrolled one shows up […]
Every replenishment system has to answer two questions for every item: when to reorder, and how much. The reorder point answers the first. Min-max, economic order quantity, and order multiples answer the second. Get them right and you stop running out of fast movers while carrying less of everything else. Get them wrong, or set […]
The annual physical inventory has a predictable pattern: the warehouse shuts down, everyone counts, adjustments are posted, and within a few months the numbers drift again. Cycle counting replaces that with small, frequent counts throughout the year. Done well, it keeps inventory accurate all the time, finds the causes of errors while they are still […]
Most ERP requests for proposal fail in the same way. They run to 40 pages and 600 line items, every vendor answers “yes” to almost all of them, and the selection team ends up exactly where it started: with a stack of similar-looking responses and no real way to tell the systems apart. A useful […]
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