Key Factors To Consider When Choosing Manufacturing Solutions

By Randy Sei
Before you acquire any software solution (Enterprise Resource Planning), the first thing you would do is to define your needs. What exactly you are looking for? What is your business objective and what kind of return on investment are you looking for?

There are many software providers out there. Some are giant applications that come with multiple generic functions that can be configured to suit your business needs. These are broad based applications that aim to serve multiple industries and verticals. However, there are also many software providers for manufacturing industry which provide specific solutions to fit industry-specific business needs. Which ever you choose, here are some common goals of implementing software solutions in a manufacturing environment:

• Reduce cycle time
• Integrate the supply chain
• Manage the shop floor
• Support an expanding number of distribution channels, and
• More efficiently used capital
• Leverage a robust manufacturing technology to save time and money.

To be more competitive, manufacturers need to integrate processes and work-flows from the warehouse to the shop floor to the loading dock so they can squeeze out production costs while ensuring product quality. Manufacturing software vendors enables their customers to meet their unique business and manufacturing technology needs by integrating IT assets into more open and adaptable business systems.?

Manufacturing software vendors offer the manufacturing solutions and business applications that help companies efficiently design, build, and market products. Manufacturers can swiftly deploy proven applications to accelerate time-to-market while driving down production costs and more efficiently integrating the supply chain.

Many manufacturing solutions includes an integrated set of flexible solutions developed by manufacturing experts to improve production, more efficiently utilize capital assets, and integrate manufacturing with other business processes. The flexibility of the software platform is rather important. Simple and specific software solutions allows you to rapidly deploy software to improve business processes with little need for customization. Large and complex application software may cost you millions of dollars to acquire and implement and the time taken be several years before you can realise the benefits. These large applications require a large IT team to support and implement. Whereas small niche manufacturing solutions allow you to implement them quickly and very low cost and rip the benefit within 3 to 6 months. Many of these small applications are simple and can be easily implemented even without much IT professionals’ help.

For small and medium size companies with short product life cycle and competitive environment, my preference is to go for smaller, more specific solutions which can be implemented with 3-4 months without customization (expect some reporting). Solutions that should be running on standard Relational Database Management System (or commonly known as Database) and open technology in which data can be accessed for analysis easily.

Implementing smaller applications allows you to choose best-of-breed packages and integrate them together. With the availability of Web Servers and various open standard for integration, this dream of best-of-bread is easily realised (with little money).

Ultimately, the choice depends on your company objective, Return-On-Investment horizon, product life cycle, budget, human resources and operating environment. The choice is yours.