Fabrication Industry
SYSPRO for Fabrication is designed to support metal or fiberglass fabrication seamlessly linking all of your company’s critical operations. SYSPRO’s flexible business solutions will enhance your organization’s efficiencies in meeting the challenges of global competition, high costs of raw materials and changing customer expectations. SYSPRO provides the tools to improve production and sales to achieve optimal efficiency, responsiveness and throughput.
Check out some of the more common business challenges and how SYSPRO ERP can help your firm solve them:
Request a Demonstration
Business Needs
Maintain Accurate Job Costs
In custom-build, as well as project and service environments, job cost accuracy is essential in attaining correct pricing and profitability, as well as to assess the reliability of the quoting process, while in standard costing environments, it is essential for tracking the validity of current standard costs.
For custom-build environments, SYSPRO’s Quotations module enables detailed estimates based on all aspects of the job (or jobs) and the automatic creation of jobs, purchase orders and sales orders based on approved quotes. For project and service environments, this same functionality is available with the added benefits of hierarchical analysis of costs and margins.
SYSPRO’s fully integrated solution enables the capture, tracking and analyzing of job and product costs and profitability in real-time. Details of expected versus actual costs for material and scrap, internal and external labor, fixed and overhead costs per job, or group of jobs, is available through SYSPRO’s powerful querying and reporting features. This enables the identification of exceptions and problems as they occur, such as areas of high cost expenditure, production scrap and rework, and problems in the quoting process.
With SYSPRO’s visibility to product cost details and profit margins, including for co and by-products, you can evaluate job cost performance, margin analysis and pricing with confidence.
Manage Customer Relationships and Service
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. You can group contacts for related entities and record details regarding interactions such as phone calls, emails and visits against the contact. Integration with Microsoft Outlook allows email correspondence to be sent and updated as an activity within the Contact Management system.
SYSPRO’s Customer Relationship Management provides you with the functionality of the Contact Management System, as well as the tools to manage the track marketing campaigns, service issues, product returns, warranty and repair histories, quote and sales order information.
Your ability to deliver quality products faster, with more customer-specific features, and at stable or even reduced prices differentiates you in a discerning market place. Features such as available-to-promise and customer delivery performance reporting, provide information to help you improve your customer service levels and the Customer/stock code interchange functions gives you the flexibility to allow your customers to order by their part number.
SYSPRO enables you to keep a history of sales data as well as individual customer-related product activities, so you can easily identify buying patterns and preferences, and quickly create repeat orders by copying and amending previous ones. SYSPRO Forecasting uses sales history to identify trends and seasonal components of demand, thereby assisting you in calculating more accurate forecasts, which in turn leads to better planning and improved customer service levels.
SYSPRO’s simple, extended and contract pricing mechanisms give you flexibility to apply one-dimensional pricing and discounting, or tailor these requirements to individual customers. Where customers are large organizations, such as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) or retails chains, with whom prices are negotiated on a contract or volume basis, more complex pricing is required. SYSPRO’s pricing, trade management and sales analysis facilities enable you to provide acceptable pricing terms and delivery targets to large customers without sacrificing profitability.
Plan, execute and control production
SYSPRO ERP supports a variety of manufacturing techniques all within one fully integrated solution. Whether manufacturing to order or to stock, using discrete or process methods; engineering to order; or building large project-based assets, SYSPRO’s outstanding flexibility ensures a comprehensive set of tools to help you plan, record, track and control your output.
- SYSPRO’s Quotations and Estimating ensures the integrity of cost and profit calculation for bid processes in project, as well as job shop, engineer and make-to-order environments.
- SYSPRO’s Product Configurator facilitates seamless rules-based order processing for assemble, configure and make-to-order products.
- For discrete and process manufacturers, comprehensive bills of material functionality enables the definition of simple single-level bills through to complex formulations with multiple units of measure and relationship definitions.
- Master data features ensure accurate calculation of lead times and dynamic elapsed times, and assist in the optimization of production order quantities, while Engineering Change Control facilitates the efficient management of changes to product versions.
- Planning features include forecasting, material requirements planning and capacity planning, while scheduling functionality extends from single-constraint scheduling to multi-constraint scheduling and sequencing.
- Material and labor consumed in production may be backflushed, or, for longer production runs, issued as consumed to work in progress.
- Tracking of actual versus estimated labor hours, material usage and scrap is facilitated through the Work in Progress module
- CAD integration via SYSPRO’s e.net Solutions enable version-independent integration.
Reduce time to market for customer-driven product designs and variations
When developing customizable end-products, flexibility, speed, and accuracy in meeting customer demand is essential to remaining competitive.
SYSPRO enables you to improve your time-to-market performance and streamline constituent processes through a variety of toolsets:
- its rules-based Product Configurator, provides streamlined order-taking by non-technical staff, it facilitates the automatic generation of factory orders and purchase orders, with all the relevant detail, to make or assemble the correct customer-specific configuration of the product.
- the Configurator mitigates the need for manual input or additional bills of materials to cover all product permutations, and drastically reduces the margin for input errors.
- For complete engineer- and design-to-order requirements, SYSPRO speeds the processing of inquiries through its estimating and quotations functionality, with estimating providing an accurate view of both standard and non-standard material and labor costs, ensuring accurate profitability projection and quoting.
- Furthermore, SYSPRO’s powerful advanced planning functions enable you to quote accurate lead times and delivery dates based on capacity and existing loads.
Synchronize Supply with Customer Demand
SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders and Releases provides you with the tools to record contracts with your OEM customers and provides you with an accurate means of tracking and reconciling cumulative release quantities and converting them into sales order quantities. SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders enable SYSPRO customers to easily update call-off schedules for their OEM clients, as well as reconcile the cumulative position against their OEM contracts.
Confirmed customer schedules, in turn, become an input for demand planning and ultimately, production and purchasing requirements linked to the relevant schedule requirement dates. SYSPRO’s Requirements Planning and Factory Scheduling provide you with the tools to implement LEAN principles, manage the replenishment process and ensure that you meet your OEM contract service levels.
Streamlined electronic collaboration with your OEM customers is facilitated through features such as Document Flow Manager, SYSPRO e.net solutions, EDI, Office Automation and Messaging, fax, email and various Business-to-Business import and export functions, thus reducing response time, margin for error and penalties associated with disruption to OEM production lines.
Reduce Bottlenecks
|
Critical to continuous improvement strategies is the reduction of overall product lead time to enable companies to be more agile and responsive to unpredictable and changing customer demands. Identifying and reducing the number and severity of manufacturing bottlenecks is crucial to any lead time reduction strategy. SYSPRO’s Work in Progress module provides tracking of expected versus actual operation times, assisting you in identifying bottleneck patterns and inaccurate demonstrated capacity estimates. |
|
Where nothing can be done to remove short-term bottlenecks, management of production schedules to take account of them is critical to optimizing your production resources and providing realistic order delivery dates. SYSPRO Factory Scheduling provides one-click highlighting of bottleneck operations on existing schedules, as well as what-if scheduling and sequencing to optimize utilization of available production resources. |
Manage Raw Material Lead Times
Component-to-operation linking and component offsets facilitate the implementation of JIT and LEAN purchasing principles. In addition, inventory order point indicators, such as reorder point, minimum/maximum levels and safety stock provide the tools to help you mitigate problems associated with unreliable supply of long-lead time items.
Track Material and Operation Flow Through Manufacturing
In SYSPRO, the material and labor allocations are created manually for a non-standard job, or automatically for a job created from a bill of material or estimate. In all cases, you can specify whether the materials are required a certain number of days before the job finish date, or at the start of a specific operation. This provides complete visibility to the material and labor that is required for any particular job, and when it is required in the production process. Also, once a job is in progress, you can easily pinpoint where the job is currently located in the routing, as well as what material has been issued so far, and the job’s overall progress.
Trial kitting mechanisms provide complete visibility to the availability of materials required for jobs. Flexible posting functionality enables you to issue materials and labor to jobs at any time via a number of methods, including specific and kit issues. In addition, SYSPRO e.net solutions and Job Import functionality enable seamless integration of shop floor data collection systems.
Powerful queries and reports provide detailed information on job status and delivery performance information.
Optimize Production Capacity
|
Increasing manufacturing efficiency means getting the right balance between demand and supply, while optimizing capacity, improving throughput, and reducing waste and variable costs. SYSPRO provides interactive decision-support tools that give you visibility and control over all inputs and outputs. |
|
SYSPRO’s material requirements planning functionality gives you an integrated picture of your time-phased demand and supply, enabling you to model ‘what-if’ scenarios to produce viable replenishment plans. |
|
SYSPRO Factory Scheduling assists you in maintaining accurate and up-to-date production schedules that take account of your material plans and the complexities of your factory. This enables better co-ordination between work centers, increased productivity, reduced work-in-progress and achievement of improved customer service levels. |
|
Material and labor tracking, as well as cost, scrap and utilization management is facilitated through SYSPRO’s Work in Progress module, which enables you to track in-process production at every stage and identify problems as they occur. |
Key Features and Functions
Job Actuals versus Estimates
Backflushing
Alternate routings
SYSPRO provides multiple routings to allow for the definition of alternative operation resources, such as outsourced production, contract labor hire, and substitute machines or work centers; this feature also provides for the separate definition of routings for items under engineering change control. Multiple recovery rates allow for costing of the different routes, as well as the what-if costing simulations.
Bill of Materials
What-if Costing
Change Control
Change control facilitates the revision to a drawing or design released by the engineering department. SYSPRO’s Engineering Change Control module helps you to control the changes to modify or correct a part and provides full workflow and tracking of change control activities.
Blanket Purchase Orders
The purpose of these contracts is to allow a fixed price to be recorded for a specified period and/or volume, plus an agreed delivery schedule. With extensive querying and reporting capabilities, you can centrally manage anticipated deliveries and review supplier delivery performance.
SYSPRO’s Business-to-Business trading and e-commerce solution contract details can be exported into XML format for electronic exchange with trading partners.
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.
Estimating
SYSPRO’s Estimates functionality enables the definition of the materials and manufacturing processes required for the manufacture of custom-made items. Furthermore, it provides cost and lead-time calculations to enable you to derive accurate price and delivery information.
Customer Success Stories
Customer Success
MENZIES METAL PRODUCTS
Menzies Metal Products was established in 1978 to provide innovative products and custom fabrication for the roofing, building and plumbing industries. Menzies Metal employs about 50 people and markets its products across Western Canada and the United States, with branches throughout British Columbia and Alberta.
The Challenge
Phil Jones, Vice President of Menzies Metal, recognized the company had outgrown a well-known accounting package, which no longer satisfied its needs. The software was weak when it came to manufacturing and inventory – exactly the areas where Menzies needed to get a little more detailed.
The Solution
According to Jones, the implementation process went smoothly. “We had very little problem implementing SYSPRO. There’s always a learning curve, but we didn’t have much difficulty fitting the software into the business. Our main concern was making sure that the implementation did not affect Menzies’ high level of customer service, therefore the Sales Order Entry module was the most critical component. That was the first thing we needed to get up and going – and we didn’t have any problems.” Today, the business leverages key modules like Inventory, Work in Progress, Quotations, Order Entry, and Bill of Materials (BOM). “Those are what I would call the standard configuration for a manufacturer,” says Jones. “We implemented Shop Clock as well, to help us quantify the time employees spend on particular jobs, and that’s worked out very well.”
The Result
The implementation of SYSPRO had an immediate and positive effect on Menzies’ business processes. “We were able to get a high degree of accuracy on product costs quickly, and it also streamlined the fabrication of custom products,” Jones says. “The Quotations module automates the process, and helps us keep track of how accurate our projections are in quoting a job. As we move forward with SYSPRO it continues to give us better quality information on which to base our business decisions.” SYSPRO has also helped Menzies enhance its relationships with suppliers and customers. “On the material requirements side,” says Jones, “SYSPRO gives us the information we need to do Just-in-Time inventory deals with some of our suppliers. It also gives us accurate information about our own buying habits, which helps us negotiate deals.” On the customer side of the equation, SYSPRO sales projections and inventory control have helped Menzies achieve a fill rate of approximately 99%. “I depend on SYSPRO,” says Jones. “It’s intuitive software to learn and use, and for every business problem or need, there’s always a solution. We’ve been used as a reference site for SYSPRO, and I’ve been straightforward in recommending it to potential users. For companies of the size I’ve worked for, it’s the very best bang for the buck.”
For more information, explore our SYSPRO Content Library:
