Consumer Products
SYSPRO solutions are tailored to address the needs of companies in the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of fast moving consumer goods, consumer packaged goods and consumer durables. SYSPRO is dedicated to improving your operational efficiency and productivity, giving you visibility across complicated supply chains, and enabling quick responses to changing consumer demands. It will assist you in facing challenges such as unpredictable trends, short life cycles and long procurement lead times.
SYSPRO’s technology solutions and accurate analysis capabilities will empower you to eradicate waste and achieve increased revenues and profits.
Request a Demonstration
Business Needs
Identify and Respond to Seasonal Demand Patterns
You can choose to create forecasts at stock code/warehouse level, and if the Families and Grouping module is installed, you can aggregate your forecasts into user-defined groupings. A variety of forecast calculation methods are available, including the competition method, and the module also provides facilities to track the forecast quality. Additionally, you can select to manually forecast items which require market intelligence, while selecting to batch forecast all other items, and there are facilities that enable you to filter or adjust sales history for outliers and other abnormalities. Multi-level analysis of product performance is available, including at stock code, warehouse, product class, supplier, planner and buyer levels, as well as at user-defined group level if the Families and Groupings module is installed.
The approved forecast becomes the demand input to SYSPRO’s Material Requirements Planning system. This gives your planners and buyers visibility to the resources and actions required to meet the demand in the short, medium and long term.
Manage Customer Relationships and Service
The standard of service that you provide your customers makes all the difference in building solid relationships and gaining the competitive edge.
SYSPRO provides capabilities to manage these relationships to make better business decisions about expected customer, product and market activity. These include:
- SYSPRO’s Contact Management system caters for multiple contacts to be assigned to organizations and individuals with whom you deal. These can include your customers and suppliers, as well as entities such as charities and government departments.
- SYSPRO’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a powerful web based toolset providing you the tools to manage the track marketing campaigns, service issues, product returns, warranty and repair histories, quote and sales order information.
- Improve customer service levels with features such as available-to-promise and customer delivery performance reporting
- Historical sales data can easily identify buying patterns and preferences, and using this sales history in your forecasting can help identify trends and seasonal components of demand, thereby assisting you in calculating more accurate forecasts.
- SYSPRO’s pricing mechanisms give you flexibility to apply multi-dimensional pricing and discounting, or tailor these requirements to individual customers, without sacrificing profitability.
Manage Large and Diverse Inventories
SYSPRO provides the tools to help you optimize your inventory investment without sacrificing customer service. It enables you to effectively plan and control diverse and extensive product lines in a single or multi-warehouse environment, facilitating the creation of warehouses and bin locations to represent both physical and virtual stock locations.
Whether you stock, sell, purchase or manufacture items by unit, weight, volume, pack or container size, SYSPRO’s multiple units of measure per stock item give you the flexibility to accurately record and track stock quantities.
Inventory Optimization functionality aids the sales and operation planning process. Decision-making on desired levels of inventory and customer service is enhanced through the graphical output from its powerful Pareto analysis and forecasting tools. Master information such as order policies, gross requirements rules, lead times, safety stock and minimum/maximum levels assist in planning replenishment, while extensive costing facilities ensure accurate costing of sales, purchase and manufacturing activities.
The custom forms feature gives you the freedom to define your own fields for the capture of details, enabling you to include these in your queries, reports and transaction documentation. Also, you can add standard notations per item for automatic inclusion in various transactions such as sales orders, purchase orders and jobs, as well as link multimedia files to key data.
The Goods in Transit system gives you comprehensive quantity, variance and cost control over inter-warehouse transfers, as well as providing input into SYSPRO’s Distribution Requirements Planning.
SYSPRO’s integrated nature and powerful reporting and query facilities give you visibility to detailed stock statuses and transaction history, while perpetual inventory costing provides at-a-glance valuation of stock holdings by warehouse and stock code .
Extensive reporting is available including detailed kardex movements, identification of obsolete, slow-moving and excessive inventories, as well as reports on summary inventory quantities and exceptions based on various stock level criteria. In addition, the Office Automation and Messaging module provides the ability to create alerts and events which are automatically fired when inventory exceptions, such as ‘below minimum’ occur.
Improve Forecast Accuracy
SYSPRO Inventory, Inventory Optimization and Requirements Planning provide the tools to:
- Track and evaluate forecasts
- Help reduce forecast errors
- Manage seasonality
- Optimize inventories to meet customer service targets
Plan and Manage Distribution of Inventory and Goods in Transit
Whether you supply original equipment manufacturers, diverse retailers, after-sales service outlets, or distribute product to your own distribution centres, effective planning and control of your inventory and order fulfilment activities is essential for operational efficiency and maximum profitability. SYSPRO provides a real-time integrated view of business operations, as well as the means to manage large diverse inventories and to plan and execute sophisticated warehouse replenishment and order fulfilment requirements.
Efficient replenishment planning and fulfilment per warehouse is facilitated through SYSPRO’s Distribution Requirements Planning, multi-warehouse and Goods in Transit functionality. The system caters for warehouse-specific costs and order policies, backorders, inter-warehouse lead times, optional inclusion of transfer costs and detailed transfer documentation. Furthermore, the Goods in Transit system enables detailed control, reconciliation and balancing of inter-warehouse transfers.
Distributors supplying major retailers and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) would be challenged to optimize customer service and expand distribution capabilities without e-business capability. SYSPRO’s Web Applications enable you to provide your global customers and remote sales force with the convenience of secure 24/7 access to order placement, as well as to queries on pricing, stock availability, detailed statements and order statuses. In addition, sophisticated automated order placement and acknowledgement is facilitated through SYSPRO’s e.net solutions and Document Flow Manager.
Customer order fulfilment is managed through SYSPRO’s sophisticated sales order picking and dispatch features, while SYSPRO’s Customer Relationship Manager and Return Merchandise Authority modules provide the means to manage, control and analyse customer returns and credits.
The Blanket Sales Order module enables SYSPRO customers to easily update call-off schedules for their OEM clients, as well as to reconcile the cumulative position against their OEM contracts.
Reduce Inventory Investment While Optimizing Customer Service Levels
SYSPRO’s Material Requirements Planning gives you clear visibility to the integrated effect of current and future supply and demand, thereby enabling you to make better purchasing and production decisions and reduce excess and obsolete inventories. The inclusion of sources of supply and demand is configurable and various reports and related review programs enable easy potential oversupplies and seamless execution of suggested actions. Also, order policies by stock code at warehouse level enable you to implement lot-sizing rules for purchased and manufactured items.
In make-to-order environments, where a full material requirements planning run may not be required, features such as Advanced Trial Kitting provide full visibility to replenishment requirements for multi or single-level jobs. The purchase order to job link enables purchased or subcontracted materials to be receipted directly into specific jobs.
Standard reports such as the Inventory Exception and the MRP Potential Oversupplies report help you identify excess inventories and possible problems with your lot-sizing techniques.
Manage Complex and Highly Variable Pricing and Discount Structures in International Markets
When engaged in the fast moving consumer goods industry, your pricing strategies are built to accommodate a wide variety of customer types in wholesale and retail environments.
SYSPRO enables you to optimize your pricing strategy with comprehensive built-in tools to accommodate your needs like:
- product profitability whether cost-based, market-based, or a mix.
- different costing methods per warehouse, quotations, bill of materials, product configurator and what-if costing functionality enables you to derive cost-based quotes and pricing with confidence.
- local and foreign pricing techniques
- Manual and simple automated pricing, to contract pricing and complex trade promotions pricing and discounting.
- Sales order entry and electronic capture is streamlined through pricing automation based on customer and/or stock code matrices
- Contract pricing at customer and/or buying group level by product or product group.
- Discounted, foreign and quantity break pricing methods
- The import, export and global price update facilities enable seamless implementation of extensive price changes.
- Trade Promotions module facilitates the creation of rules that govern pricing, promotions, special offers and rebates, as well as improved promotions tracking. In addition, the system’s powerful rebate, accruals and deductions management functionality promotes fast, accurate invoicing and reconciliation, as well as improved cash flow.
Manage Dynamic Product Schedules
Having the capability to create and execute an achievable schedule requires a comprehensive view of the current situation and available resources, as well as the tools to perform efficient re-scheduling if necessary. SYSPRO’s visual scheduling products provide this capability to suit all levels of sophistication and complexity, from basic manual drag and drop, to automatic algorithm-driven scheduling and changeover optimization.
Particularly suited to job shop, batch process and project environments, SYSPRO Factory Scheduling provides the planner with an interactive decision support tool that helps balance demand and resource availability. Optimization is enhanced through the consideration of priorities, constraints, and conflicts, as well as sequencing and synchronization requirements. Automatic forward, backward and bi-directional scheduling is available, along with manual intervention. The customizable graphical interface enables quick and easy identification of schedule loads, job and operation statuses and links, and resource availability.
One-click schedule performance metrics, as well as the ability to run, save and compare schedules, provide what-if capability and enable the scheduler to choose the best option for the current circumstances.
Whether you operate a simple scheduling environment requiring single-constraint finite scheduling, or a complex environment requiring multi-constraint and rules-based finite scheduling, SYSPRO can help you optimize your scheduling activities with its Graphical Planning Board (GPB), Factory Scheduler (FS) or Advanced Scheduler (AS).
Improve Electronic Collaboration with Trading Partners
Quick response times and accuracy in fulfilling orders are critical to your reputation in a diverse and demanding global market. Your larger customers and suppliers may look increasingly to closer collaboration to cut production timetables and minimize disruption to their supply chain.
SYSPRO automates and streamlines the order-to-delivery process, and provides complete visibility to an integrated view of all operations via secure electronic data interchange and collaborative commerce through features such as:
- CAD integration
- Document Flow Manager
- SYSPRO e.Net solutions
- EDI
- Office Automation and Messaging
- And various Business-to-Business purchase and sales import and export functions.
If your customers include Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) you can import and easily reconcile vendor EDI releases is using SYSPRO’s Blanket Sales Order module.
Key Features and Functions
Promotions Management
SYSPRO’s promotions management covers the overseeing and control of promotions, special offers and rebates. Promotions can take the form of temporary price reductions taken off the invoice, monies accrued for redemption by the customer and special offer goods at no cost (such as ‘buy one get one free programs’) or at minimal cost (such as the ‘buy one, get the second one at half price’ programs). In addition, promotional pricing, in the form of >single level price reductions, can be applied to a company’s list price based on the units of measure purchased by a customer. All promotions can have valid on and off dates and each promotion granted can be recorded for analysis purposes.
Material Requirements Planning
Multiple Units of Measure
SYSPRO’s multiple units of measure feature enables accurate ordering, manufacturing selling, pricing and costing of inventory items by enabling the transaction to take place in the relevant unit of measure. For each stock code, you can define up to five units of measure: stocking, alternate, other, manufacturing and costing.
Available to Promise
SYSPRO’s available-to-promise (ATP) feature helps make reliable delivery promises to your customers, by showing you that portion of your inventory and planned production that is available to fill their orders and on which dates. You can choose between regular (discrete) and cumulative modes of display and can define which components of supply and demand should be included in the calculation.
Pareto Analysis
Price/cost percentage change
SYSPRO enables you to view and optionally update global increases or decreases to either the selling price or the inventory cost of your stock items based on various selection criteria, such as stock code, warehouse, supplier and product class. The Price Cost Percentage Change feature provides a fast method of effecting price changes by a percentage, a percentage based on cost, or a percentage based on an existing price code. You can make changes to existing price codes, or create entirely new price codes if, for example, you are creating new customer buying groups. The feature also facilitates rapid implementation of global cost changes by a percentage based on existing cost, which is useful in a standard costing environment.
Inventory Optimization
In generating Forecasts the system allows for the user to choose from a number of predefined Algorithms or a Competition method can be chosen in which the system will select the best algorithm based on the ability of each of the algorithms to forecast the most recent period(s) (i.e. it will choose the mathematical formula best suited to an item’s historical sales and from that predict future sales). Some of the algorithms can be tuned by the user by changing parameters such as smoothing factors. In addition some of the algorithms are designed specifically to recognize seasonality and forecast accordingly.
Families and groupings enables you to classify and group stock items into ‘collections’ for the purpose of optimizing your inventory through better analysis and forecasting. This enables you to forecast and analyze data at a higher level than the stock code level defined in manual forecasting.
Sales History
Copy Sales orders
The Copy Sales Order facility saves you time when creating new or repeat customer orders, by enabling you to copy an existing order to the same, or a new customer, and, optionally, to apply a different warehouse to the new order. Furthermore, at the time of copying an order, you can enter a new customer purchase order number, elect to place all lines into backorder, and select to copy custom form information; once the new order has been created, you can amend the order information as required.
Customer Success Stories
Customer Success
DUNLOP MANUFACTURING
Located in the Bay area of Northern California, Dunlop Manufacturing is a leading manufacturer of world-class electronic instrumental accessories for the music industry with a product line that includes picks, capos, slides, strings and other musical instrument accessories.
The Challenge
As Dunlop’s product line evolved and gained popularity, the company recognized that it was in need of a manufacturing software program capable of efficiently handling a high volume of transactions while helping deliver customer orders, on-time and error free. Additionally, the company wanted a solution that would integrate all departments of the business and support rapid company growth.
The Solution
Among the reasons for the selection of SYSPRO were:
- The ability to support continued business growth without significant increases in staff head count
- Strong manufacturing functionality fully integrated with all other departments across the company
- Increased efficiencies through the use of an integrated system without relying on spreadsheets and other offline, manually prepared, documents
- Timely, comprehensive, and accurate reporting; and,
- Strong implementation project team at SAS.
The Result
SYSPRO has greatly enhanced communications and efficiencies at Dunlop. It has proven to be effective and easy to use, supplying the needed data to workers at a rapid speed. “The biggest difference is that SYSPRO allowed us to improve communications. It is easier to use. People can just log in and get answers quickly.”
Customer Success
YETI CYCLES
Yeti Cycles, a high-end mountain bike manufacturer, was founded in 1985. In 2001, two Yeti employees bought the company and have since patented several leading-edge technologies, including a suspension design called Switch Infinity. The quality of Yeti’s designs is a direct reflection of their commitment to racing.
The Challenge
A singular focus on building the world’s best bikes fueled such phenomenal growth that Yeti Cycles was forced to update their technology solutions. Consisting of a combination of internal, third-party and QuickBooks software, the previous solution no longer offered the scalability that was required for rapid growth.
The Solution
The Yeti Cycles cultural values of speed, efficiency and a true passion to be “the best” led Yeti to discover and install SYSPRO. The Yeti team was resolute that their technology solution partner understands the company’s desire to keep things simple and uncomplicated. ERP scalability, without undue organizational stress, is also a high priority. Yeti found the ultimate combination with SYSPRO ERP.
The Result
SYSPRO’s seamless ability to accommodate and support Yeti’s rapid growth is the number one reason why Yeti Cycles has remained a highly satisfied customer for more than a decade. Even more remarkable, says management, is that, despite the company’s remarkable growth, the company has added zero additional technology people to support the SYSPRO deployment.
“You hear a lot of bad technology stories out there, particularly when a business has a lot of change, as we have,” said Hoogendoorn. “We’ve had the opposite experience with SYSPRO; it is highly flexible, lets us operate on as few resource spends as possible, and has contributed to us achieving great profits.”
For more information, explore our SYSPRO Content Library:
