TECHNOLOGY

How Can An ERP System Benefit A Company’s Manufacturing Process?

Published

9 months ago

August 12, 2023

How Can An ERP System Benefit A Company's Manufacturing Process?

Having the right ERP system can revolutionize a company’s manufacturing process by streamlining operations, enhancing efficiency, and providing real-time insights.

Today, the manufacturing industry is highly dynamic and competitive, making it critical for such businesses to have an integrated solution that can improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase sales and profitability, and enable the organization to make accurate, informed, and strategic decisions.

Every industry has many hurdles in attaining its goals due to fierce competition and increased customer demand. They can achieve complete, up-to-date, end-to-end business application services with the assistance of ERP software.

Integrating an ERP system into manufacturing processes offers multiple benefits. The ERP platform acts as a central hub, uniting functions across departments and streamlining business processes organization-wide. So with that in mind, let’s dive in.

What is ERP?

Enterprise resource planning is a form of software businesses use to manage their day-to-day operations. Data can move across applications in ERP systems, often through information sharing on-site/on-premises or in a cloud environment.

An ERP software system improves productivity and project management by allowing for improved planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting on an organization’s financial health and procedures. EERP systems have become crucial for small, medium, and large businesses in a variety of industries.

How Can ERP Software Improve the Manufacturing Process

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Financial and Accounting Management

Most manufacturing companies utilize computer software to help them manage their finances. However, not all business intelligence tools can provide a thorough picture of the situation with actionable data.

With centralized company resource planning technology, financial forecasting is regularly changed to reflect shop floor reality and thus becomes more accurate. Losses and overall production costs are decreased. So, the best ERP systems for manufacturing aid in budget management and hence add to increased overall productivity in the manufacturing industry.

Reduce Costs

Solid ERP software helps manufacturing processes lower overall operational costs by replacing manual, time-consuming operations with automated, optimized processes that provide real-time business information. By enhancing worker productivity, ERP for the manufacturing industry reduces labor expenses while improving precision and decreasing mistake rates to reduce losses.

Tracking inventory precisely and integrating it efficiently with production planning saves extra inventory and warehousing costs.

Efficient Productive Management

ERP systems provide monitoring and management of the full production cycle, from raw material acquisition to final goods. Workflow automation and real-time updates enable efficient task coordination, decreasing bottlenecks and delays.

Manufacturing orders, work-in-process tracking, and quality control processes can all be integrated smoothly, increasing production speed and quality.

Automate Work Order Management

ERP software enables manufacturers to automate work orders that include the date and time of execution, customer name, sales order, sales contract, product amount, and staff assigned responsibility. Each work order gets a routing code to help management track the journey.

As a result, supervisors can checklist every assignment based on a work order issued and confirm that all tasks perform properly.

Strategic Decision-Making

A complete ERP solution for manufacturing improves an organization’s decision-making capability. It delivers comprehensive insights and visibility into every department and business process, allowing the company to make more educated, precise, and timely business choices.

Access to crucial performance measures such as overall sales, sales margin, and so on assists manufacturing management in staying on track and making required internal decisions.

The total visibility of internal processes and departments provided by ERP for the manufacturing industry also assists management in optimizing day-to-day operations.

Project Management

Managers may maintain a closer check on the full project management life cycle in real time by bridging the gap between the various stages of the production process. The consolidation of all pertinent data allows for fact-based decision-making. This decreases the chance of error and saves the manufacturing company time and money.

You may perform conventional project management tasks such as assigning tasks, scheduling resources, and providing the information needed to manage budgets and track progress. Timesheets can be used to keep track of machine and staff hours spent on a project.

Operations Management

A corporation must be effectively organized to manage all operations associated with the manufacturing industry. The benefits of ERP manufacturing may be carefully coordinated from the supply chain through product delivery, manufacturing operations, and assembly through maintaining optimal operational efficiency.

A centralized manufacturing ERP system substantially benefits organizations in this area by enhancing communication across the various manufacturing phases.

Customer Relationship Management

Another advantage of utilizing an ERP for manufacturing is increased customer service and customer interactions. Some CRM systems are expressly intended to serve this purpose. ERP software is an all-in-one solution that combines every feature into a single computer system, eliminating the need for different software packages.

This entire process may include a relationship management function that your manufacturing company can utilize to oversee and assist with your sales efforts. Customer support is more personalized, reaction times are faster, and information is always up to date due to total access to all diverse data throughout the production process.

With these features, you gain access to comprehensive and reliable information, enabling you to concentrate your conversations on specific customer/contact groups.

Responding to Market Conditions more Quickly

ERP for the manufacturing business delivers real-time data analysis to assist companies in better estimating, planning, modifying, and responding to changing market demands. Decision makers frequently consult system-generated information to comprehend changing market demands and capitalize on client purchase trends.

Choose the best manufacturing ERP modules that give managers a 360-degree picture, allowing them to decrease forecasting errors and capitalize on fresh opportunities.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

Accurate production planning, improved inventory control, optimized process scheduling, and channel synchronization assist manufacturers to increase on-time product delivery, a vital performance indicator. Delivering products on time is crucial to sustaining client happiness.

ERP solutions for industrial firms provide real-time data so that decision-makers may get a realistic perspective of inventory levels at any moment.

Summing it up

Choosing the right ERP system for your company necessitates thoroughly examining your requirements. There are various options available, and it is critical to select the one that best reflects the realities of your company. The functions of an open-source ERP system have proven to be one of the most successful solutions for managing and coordinating all business activities for small and medium-sized businesses wanting to invest in an ERP system to enhance their manufacturing processes. This corporate resource planning tool improves results by streamlining the entire manufacturing process.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud