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, […]
You buy a product by the pallet. You receive it by the pallet. You store it by the pallet. You pick it by the case. You sell it by the case — except to three customers who buy by the each, two who buy by the inner pack, and one national account whose purchase orders […]
There’s a question that precedes every ERP decision but rarely gets asked with precision: where are we right now? Not in the abstract sense of “we need a better system.” In the specific, measurable sense of how mature your organization is in its use of technology to run the business. Because the answer determines everything […]
There’s a moment in every customer service interaction that reveals the truth about your ERP. The customer calls — or emails, or messages through the portal — with a question that should be simple. Where’s my order? Why was I charged this price? Can I add two lines to the order that shipped this morning? […]
Your sales team has an opinion about the ERP. It’s probably not a good one. Ask your best rep what the ERP does for them and you’ll get an answer that ranges from begrudging tolerance to outright hostility. The system is slow. It doesn’t show them what they need. The pricing is wrong half the […]
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