Posted by Daniele Fresca on Thu, Apr 29, 2010 @ 01:02 PM
We have all done it. We've all said something was "good enough." It isn't great, it isn't bad; it's just okay. Whether it is your house, your car, your job, etc.... we often find that settling for things is easier than pursuing another option. And we are right, it is often easier. But is it the best way to go about evaluation and decision making. No it isn't.
The same holds true with ERP software. When asked, leaders of many manufacturing companies I recently talked with tell me that their ERP software is "just okay." They know that it doesn't meet a majority of their needs but they aren't compelled enough to change. The reasons vary as infinitely as the companies themselves. For some, not changing is due to cash flow - or lack there of. For others, business is slowing down and committing to a new ERP system isn't a top priority. For a different group, the opposite is true; business is picking up speed again and now there is no time to put effort into a change. Still others feel the pain from their last ERP implementation many years ago and assume that doing nothing is simply easier than changing.
Whatever your reason is to settle for "just okay" think of this: in other aspects of your manufacturing facility is settling an option? If product rolled off your machines, conveyors, or assembly tables that was obviously flawed, would you still send them to your client? If an employee was consistently late or offered little value would you still employ them? The truth is we put more stock in the quality of our products and employees than we do in investing in the proper tools to assist in the process. ERP is one of those important tools that is often neglected and it shouldn't be.
ERP systems should make the job of running a manufacturing company easier by accurately meeting your business process and manufacturing needs. Your ERP system should allow you to do more with less! It should help identify areas within your processes where time and money can be saved. It should increase communication across all departments within the company. A great ERP should also automate information obtained from the shop floor and eliminate redundant data entry.
But it is more than just basic ERP functionality. An ERP system should also be able to provide relevant information to its users in a timely manner, with valid data. If a facility manager can't get information like "total down time and its main reason for the last 30 days" or "most profitable and least profitable produced part - based on actual costing - within the last 2 weeks" then the ERP system isn't doing enough for you. Your ERP system should tell you when tools/dies/machines are up for maintenance based on actual usage before they require repair, rather than after they fail. A good ERP system should be an enhancement to the manufacturing process, not a hindrance. By obtaining valuable and accurate information in a timely manner, ERP should help manufacturers produce better product because it identifies areas of improvement or success.
So, I invite you to take a few minutes and think about how your ERP system is helping your company and how it might help your become more competitive. Evaluate your ERP and ask is it "good enough" and then decide to demand great!
Want more information on how a great ERP can help your facility? Download our whitepaper "How The Small Get Mighty"
Posted by Liz Alflen on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 09:45 AM
Advancements in ERP system technology provide us with tremendous visibility into our operations, and the 2.0 world is embracing transparency in all matters. Information is accessible about all aspects of our work and our lives: the scheduling of our manufacturing operations, the dimensions of the parts we make, the financial viability of our customers and suppliers, and details – personal as well as professional - about our employees and partners.
In HR we’re familiar with “don’t ask , don’t tell”: don’t ask if a candidate is married, don’t tell if an employee has a medical condition. Our ERP system provides access to the HR information we need: workforce (payroll and benefits) information, skills, training and certification; applicant tracking, job descriptions, work-related injury and illnesses. Social media (in the 2.0 world) has brought additional information about all our employees and applicants to our desktops, via any number of social and professional media sites.
We have visibility, but how much transparency is appropriate from an HR perspective?
HR professionals are hard-pressed to provide guidance on these topics. We have to consider:
- Employee media usage (do we want employees “tweeting” at work? how much so?
- Recruiting policies (to use or not to use information about candidates gained via the web?)
- Just what information can be told to the hiring managers (if it’s posted on the web, can we ask about it?)
Old rules don’t apply and new rules are vague; just a few months ago most pundits recommended great caution when doing an internet search for information about a candidate and to “not friend” employees. It was believed that information gleaned via these sources was unreliable, not intended for the HR audience, or subject to interpretation (an employee calls in to work “sick” and subsequently posts to their social media site that they are out and about).
A few years ago a hiring manager informed me that she had “Googled” a candidate and discarded this candidate based on the public information they had posted to their social media website. In another example, an executive was reviewing posts linked to the company name when he spotted a link to an employee who had posted information about a personal legal matter. It came up because the employee was linked to both the company name and the information they had posted, perhaps imprudently, about their legal problems. At the time, I cautioned both against sharing the fact that they had accessed this information at all.
Now, however, experts promote transparency, to accept this free-flowing of information and relationships as part of the new model, much like enterprise management systems allow visibility into every aspect of business operations. Participants (executives, employees, candidates) must be tacitly aware that information is available on a public forum, and they have a choice of whether to post information “publicly”, or more privately to “friends”. An individual can establish a “personal brand”, being personal and professional at the same time, allowing professional colleagues glimpses into a personal life, such as the music listened to or the books read, in order to build deeper relationships with business associates. According to Mitch Joel (“Six Pixels of Separation”), “the best connections are real and authentic”. In order to grow your business, “you are going to need a way to understand more about the individuals you are connecting to.” This philosophy promotes validity; participants are accountable for the information they post, about themselves, their company, and the products they represent. This requires a great deal of trust, diligence, and a degree of caution.
The growth of issues such as this in HR mirrors the growth of the enterprise-wide perspective. The more inclusive and integrated the perspective, the more all of our relationships promote ourselves as well as the enterprise.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you “friend” colleagues and business associates? Do you ever skip work and post on your social media that you went to the beach? On second thought, don’t answer that… Your HR manager doesn’t want to know.
Posted by Tina Jolicoeur on Wed, Apr 21, 2010 @ 04:13 PM
Any employer knows it takes a lot of time out of every week to manage their employees' Human Resources and Payroll needs, and every year with new laws and tax changes it seems to take even more time. Some companies have entire departments devoted to HR and Payroll while many others, the majority it seems, have their managers, supervisors and employees wearing many hats, only one of them being HR/Payroll. Wouldn't it be great to free up some of that time to devote yourselves to turning a profit rather than answering the same questions over and over again?
How much vacation time do I have left to take? Did you enter my address change? When does my training certification expire? What is my deduction for my 401K? My boyfriend and I are back together and he says if I really love him I will make him my emergency contact, can I change it, again? Wouldn't it be great to be able to share this information with the employee requesting it without any involvement from you?
This is where the new EnterpriseIQ Employee Portal steps in and assists both Human Resources and employees by allowing the employee to view and even edit some of their employment information.
Through the Employee Portal employees may view their employment information such as their date of hire, job title, etc. They may view and edit their mailing address. They may also view human resources information such as birth date, marital status, etc. The employees can even view their dependents and beneficiary information and edit their beneficiaries. And yes, they can view their emergency contact and edit when necessary without any HR involvement.
Employees may also view the tax codes currently applied to their paychecks along with any additional taxes deducted from each paycheck and the marital status for the tax codes. They can view their deductions, like 401K, and they can change their beneficiary for the deductions. They can ensure their training certifications are up to date and plan on getting retraining before their certification and training items expire.
And finally employees may view their vacation accrual status, including hours accrued, hours taken and hours available per year.
All of this is available to IQMS customers as an enhancement to the Payroll and/or Workforce modules. It requires an Apache connection that many customers already use for WMSIQ and WebDirect. The information is secure, the users log in with their EnterpriseIQ user name and password. The data from the Payroll and/or Workforce modules is accessed in real time, and if the employee modifies data, it's written immediately to the database without any Human Resources or Payroll involvement. Alerts can be set up if HR or Payroll would like to be notified when a record has been modified.
Regardless of the number of employees you have dedicated to Human Resources and Payroll, the EnterpriseIQ Employee Portal is a time saver.
How are existing manufacturing facilities handling employee changes now? Is your manufacturing ERP system helping in this area?
Posted by Randy Flamm on Fri, Apr 16, 2010 @ 07:24 AM
We've all read how a popular automaker has been under fire recently for their quality problems. I can just imagine how devastating it must be to find out that a product you've been shipping for years is subject to a recall for a quality defect. The first step in damage control would be to completely understand the underlying cause of the problem. Many times the fault lies in one of the raw materials used to manufacture the product. In that case, strong lot tracing functionality can be the difference between recalling millions vs. recalling thousands or less. In order for lot traceability to be cost effective it should be built into the normal workflow of the manufacturing process.
The first step begins when the raw materials are purchased and received. At that time the vendor lot number of the container of material is communicated to your ERP system. This communication can take many forms such as a vendor supplied advance shipping notice (EDI ASN), bar coded labels or packing slips. However it's done the lot number must follow the raw material until it is consumed by the next level product. Many times an agreement can be made with the vendor to supply customer defined labeling for serialized control that can be sent electronically via EDI to the ERP system. This method eliminates the cost and accuracy issues of relabeling while converting foreign vendor labels to ERP native serialized labels. Business rules for manual receipts include being able to setup mandatory lot number entry before the transaction is allowed to go through.
The second step is to rely on the inventory control system to keep the material container lot numbers separated from each other. This separation must be built into the system and cause minimal burden to the user. As an example, a warehouse inventory location can contain many lots of the same material but they all need to be listed by FIFO and accessible for allocation or back flushing individually.
The third step is to have the system generate and assign a manufacturing (FG) lot number to the products being produced in real time. All levels of products including sub assemblies will be assigned FG lot numbers during production. Typically the generation of a new FG lot number happens when an event takes place. Events are things like starting a new raw material lot number, machine restarts or even operator changes. As a rule, the more often FG lot numbers are changed the more granular the lot traceability will be making it easier to pinpoint critical information.
The fourth step occurs during production reporting via hand scanners, touch screens, automated conveyors, pallet wrappers or input screens. The result of the reporting is a "balanced" inventory transaction. A balanced transaction includes adding the parts that were manufactured and relieving the raw material used to make them. As the transactions are applied to the perpetual inventory they are logged in the transaction log. All inventory transactions are logged. No exception. The transaction log is the key to lot number traceability. It contains all kinds of information about the transactions including both FG lot number and raw material lot number fields. This creates the ability to query the transaction log to cross reference lot number "trees".
Incorporating these 4 steps during the normal production reporting and inventory transaction process will provide bullet proof pain free lot traceability.
To download product datasheets on various capabilities mentioned, click here.
Posted by Diane Ramaglia on Mon, Apr 12, 2010 @ 09:22 AM
When a company purchases a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system there are any number of reasons why they have made that decision. A company would normally have a project team that will implement the system and they are considered the in-house experts for their functional areas. They go down the path of implementing specific modules and during that time they might hold off on improving or implementing other modules that might streamline their business processes. They might say, let's do this at a later date and focus on what is critical at that time.
A common theme is that they are live on the system and they never seem to go back and look at what they can still improve. They get busy with their day-to-day activities or employees that were on the implementation team leave and no one takes over that expertise. So there is minimum improvement while they are using the system.
When a company spends that much money on software and consulting services, I would think that they would want to improve and streamline their business processes because, in the end, it would be a cost savings. You could possibly remove staff that is no longer needed or you may have an increase in business and not have to add more staffing.
As a manager of a Professional Service department for an ERP system, I am starting to see an increase in companies that are re-implementing because they see the benefit. Is this something your company would be interested in doing?
Posted by Daniele Fresca on Thu, Apr 08, 2010 @ 06:41 AM
This is the year! You have decided you are going to evaluate your existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system or make the leap to buy a new one. Congratulations.
Now where do you begin? There are many tools available to help (internet sites, downloadable ERP questionaires, consultants) to evaluate and narrow the field of suitable suppliers. However, I would suggest that one of the best decisions will be to make "industry specific" a key determining factor in the overall evaluation.
In the first stages of vendor selection, often times immediate features, functions, databases, and cost are on the top of the list for review. They should be. But whether or not an ERP system is designed with your company business and manufacturing processes in mind should also be among your top criteria. Why? Because a highly effective ERP system cannot be eveything to everybody and still have the depth to meet the needs of specific industries. An ERP system that speaks the same language as your processes, your employees, and your business culture provide a competitive edge over ERP systems that don't. This criteria also gives you insight into what other companies in your industry are using their systems for. By this I mean that ERP systems that are industry specific have development driven by other companies in the same industry.
For example, in the medical industry does the ERP understand and handle complaint tracking? Do the ERP salespeople say "yes" because you can pick up the phone, take a complaint, and type it as a note somewhere in the software or is there a specific module for complaint tracking? What about the automotive industry? Does part of their electronic data interchange (EDI) process include any manual entry or is it completely automated? How about plastic injection molding? Does a family tool bill of material (BOM) require more than one BOM or more than one machine to schedule?
Industry specificity also translates to quicker ROI because implementation and training times are reduced. Choosing an ERP system that understands the industry you are part of makes it easier when comparing your needs to the software. The ability of a software to identify the subtle nuances associated to your industry make data transfer, data import, and the roadmap of implementation more concise. In addition, customer driven requirements that are inherent in your industry are known and therefore manufacturers don't have to hassle with "workarounds." Instead of modifying all the manufacturing processes to fit the software, it is simply the other way around.
So when you decide to evaluate whether your existing software fits your needs or an upcoming purchase, looking at industry specific ERP will give you a competitive edge.