Machinery and Equipment Industry

Machinery and Equipment

The Machinery and Equipment industry is a labor intensive industry where assembly operations for these end products are complex, and global market fluctuations stress the importance to support lean manufacturing and cost efficiencies.

The organizations engaged in designing, manufacturing and supplying industrial and commercial machinery and equipment are broken down into three industry groups: special purpose machinery (agricultural, construction, and mining); manufacturing (commercial and service); and general-purpose machinery (ventilation and engines).

SYSPRO offers a variety of capabilities designed to automate and streamline this competitive industry….

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Business Needs

Adopt LEAN Manufacturing

Adopt LEAN Manufacturing Practices

From enabling the identification and tracking of non-value adding activities inherent in your current operational processes, to the automation of manual processes, SYSPRO’s powerful functionality provides you with the tools to implement your LEAN initiatives. Its integrated nature and ease-of-use facilitates the effortless extraction of financial and operational information required for Value Stream Mapping (VSM).

SYSPRO’s Inventory module is a synchronized hub providing a consolidated view of all stock locations and those activities that impact inventory optimization and customer service levels, as well as the end-to-end elements of costs and lead times. Features can assist in identifying those products that are suitable for VSM focus, while SYSPRO modules such as Engineering Change Control, Bills of Material, Work-in Progress and Factory Scheduling facilitate the evaluation of targets for kaizen programs, such as reduction in design and manufacturing costs, cycle times, queues and setups.

SYSPRO’s powerful inspection, serial tracking and lot traceability functionality aid in the identification and tracking of the source of defects, thereby enabling the implementation of kaizen initiatives towards the principle of ‘Quality at the source’.

SYSPRO’s Inventory and Bills of Material modules enable the modelling of the LEAN techniques of batch size and setup reduction on costs, lead time and inventory. SYSPRO’s Scheduling provides graphical tools to assist you in optimizing your scheduling and sequencing processes, to reduce setup and overall lead time, and improve manufacturing flexibility and sale-to-customer flow.

SYSPRO’s Document Flow Manager and SYSPRO e.net solutions enable you, not only to automate resource and time-intensive processes such as order processing, but also to handle increased volumes from global customers by providing order taking and acknowledgement on a 24/7 basis, thereby improving lead time and freeing up staff to perform other value-adding tasks.

The system’s sophisticated reporting and analytics tools enable user-defined reports and queries, while its powerful customization functionality enables the creation of efficient workflows to implement business rules and standardize business processes.

SYSPRO’s flexible integrated features and best-practice focus give you single-point visibility and control, providing support for the implementation of your LEAN initiatives.

Optimize Production

Optimize Production Capacity and Increase Manufacturing Efficiency

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:

The Material Requirements Planning (MRP) system gives you an integrated picture of your demand and supply, as well as your available capacity, enabling you to model what-if scenarios to produce viable replenishment and production plans.
SYSPRO’s Advanced Planning assists you in maintaining accurate and up-to-date production schedules, thereby increasing productivity, reducing work in progress, while achieving customer service levels.
The Work in Progress module tracks material and labor, as well as cost, scrap and utilization management, which enables you to track in-process production at every stage and identify problems as they occur.

Control Product Design

Control Product Design Changes

Constant innovation is one of the key factors to remaining competitive and on-going research and development to design new and better products is integral to the industry. Your ability to design new products and modify existing designs, as well as improve time-to-market is critical to remaining competitive and profitable.

SYSPRO provides tools to streamline and track the introduction of new product designs and amendments to existing designs, along with relevant costings. SYSPRO’s Engineering Change Control (ECC) enables you to apply strict control over your design-to-market processes by providing an integrated rules-based electronic workflow system with full version control, security and auditable history.

ECC gives you the tools to record and track new and modified product design and process changes, assess the impact of these changes on costs and associated data, and control the change routing and approval processes. ECC’s queries, audit trail, history and archive facilities, give you quick on-line access to details of prior product versions, as well as the option of reverting to the production of a prior product version if required. In addition, the facility to attach copies of product design drawings to version and release levels provides access to visual details of revisions.

The Where-used Query facility enables you to identify all items affected by the raising of an Engineering Change order for all routes identified as being under Engineering Change Control. In addition, SYSPRO provides a ‘replace component where-used’ facility that enables the quick replacement of one item with a valid substitute item, thereby streamlining design changes.

SYSPRO’s ECC, Bill of Materials, Work-in-Progress and Factory Documentation modules enable you to implement controls to ensure that your products are manufactured under consistent processes, to the correct designs and specifications. Single-level, multi-level, co and by-product bills are all catered for and flexible bill definitions accommodate complex component and sub-assembly requirements.

Reduce Lead Times

One of the key contributors to maintaining a competitive advantage in the global market is the ability to deliver quality products to customers within their expected delivery date, in a shorter time than your competitors, and within your cost constraints. To do this, you need to be able to analyze lead time constituents and non-value-add activities, from order taking to delivery, so you can identify and eliminate waste.

SYSPRO’s integrated nature gives you complete visibility across the entire supply chain, enabling the co-ordination of activities, while its powerful tools help you to monitor and improve lead time performance:

SYSPRO e.net solutions and import functions facilitate improved electronic collaboration with your customers and suppliers
Supplier performance reporting ensures you have the data to make the best supplier source decisions
The capture of customer request date enables reporting on customer delivery performance by customer, by order line.
For engineering or build-to-order items, SYSPRO’s Quotations module enables the capture of all build details and costs, thereby enabling you to calculate realistic delivery dates and pricing. It also facilitates the quick conversion of an accepted quote into a Sales order, further reducing process times.
For stocked items, SYSPRO enables the capture of standard purchasing lead time for components, as well as the automatic calculation of manufacturing and cumulative lead times based on the elements of operation times in the Bill of Materials and Quotations modules.
At the design stage, the Engineering Change Control module helps you streamline and control the product design process, helping to reduce the time from concept to market.
Material and distribution requirements planning helps you identify what you need and when you need it, adjusted for batch size for selected sources of demand and their requirement dates. Powerful queries provide pegging and time fence information to enable effective decision-making.
Work in Progress job data enables you to identify bottlenecks in production and the scheduling tool set provides excellent visibility to your production scheduling activities, facilitating improved use of manufacturing resources.

Maintain Job Costs

Maintain Accurate Job Costs

In ‘to-order’, 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 ‘to-order’ 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. This ensures the integrity of the quoted and margin information throughout the system. For project and service environments, this same functionality is available with the added benefits of hierarchical analysis of costs and margins per head and section.

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. Furthermore, for those businesses wishing to take advantage of government and private enterprise grant programs, detailed R&D job data is easily extracted for regulatory reporting requirements.

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.

After Market Service

After-market Sales, Support and Maintenance

If you’re supplying an extensive network of after-market sales agents and distributors, SYSPRO provides a series of capabilities to optimize customer service and expand distribution capabilities:

Mobility via SYSPRO Espresso to keep your mobile workforce informed on current pricing, stock availability, order status, or 24/7 access for order placement
E-Commerce through SYSPRO Cyberstore or SYSPRO’s e.net solutions
Multi-warehouse, distribution requirements planning (DRP) and goods-in-transit features facilitate the planning, execution and control of parts distribution to multiple geographic locations.
SYSPRO’s Return Merchandise and Contact Management systems provide the means to manage, control and analyze customer returns and credits.
In addition, the Lot Traceability and Serial Tracking systems enable the processing of warranty and repair claims,
While the Work in Progress module enables costing and tracking of repair and refurbishment jobs.

Key Features and Functions

Advanced Trial Kitting

Advanced trial kitting provides you with a simple method of calculating date-driven material requirements when a full material requirements planning run is not needed. You use it to determine date-specific material requirements for which supplies must be raised, in order to satisfy date-driven demand for a range of manufactured products from various demand sources. A simple review of the calculated results enables seamless creation of supply orders, whether they be works orders, purchase orders or warehouse transfers.

What-if Costing

What-if costing is used to simulate the consequence of changing your individual bought out items costs, material costs and Labor costs without affecting existing costs held on the system. Labor costs are changed by altering the what-if work center rate indicator held against each operation. Once what-if costs have been entered the BOM Cost Implosion program can be used to re-cost stock items from raw material level through to the finished product.

Material Requirements Planning

Material requirements planning assists you in planning and creating realistic production, purchasing and supply transfer schedules, and maintaining optimal stock holdings in a multi-warehouse environment. It nets-off supply against demand and calculate future material positions, suggesting changes or new manufacturing, purchasing and transfer actions to satisfy the demand.

Sales Order to Job Link

When a job is created as a direct result of a Customer order, a link is created between the sales order line and the job to enable the sales order line to automatically be released on job completion and to prevent inadvertent changes to the sales order line.

Cumulative Lead Time

Cumulative lead time represents the longest path in the bill of materials, including raw material purchasing and manufacturing lead time. It is established by reviewing the lead time for each bill of material path below the item; whichever path adds up to the greatest number defines the cumulative lead time.

Backflushing

Within, SYSPRO, backflushing enables you to record the manufacture of items without having to create works orders. This is particularly relevant in situations where the production runs are short and the benefits derived from creating a works order to track the activity on the shop floor do not justify the cost of processing all the data normally required for a works order. Backflushing enables you to receipt a finished product into stock and simultaneously post the relevant labor transactions and deplete inventory of production materials based on the bill of materials of the finished product. The system uses the manufactured item’s bill of materials to determine the material and labor charges to be included.

Serial Tracking

Serial tracking is designed to provide full tracking at transactional level for those items that have serial numbers assigned to them and that may carry a warranty. The serial numbers can either be unique per individual item or the same for a batch of items.

Manufacturing Costing

Within SYSPRO, the cost of any stock item is stored as the item’s inventory warehouse cost, using either the average, standard, FIFO, LIFO or last costing method. The material, labor, subcontract, fixed overhead and variable overhead costs of a manufactured stock item are stored against a manufactured item’s bill of material and these costs are rolled up through all levels of the bill via the Cost Implosion program, to provide the item’s expected manufacturing cost. Within SYSPRO’s Work in Progress module, the estimated costs of a job are calculated from the manufactured item’s bill of material cost, while the actual costs of the job are recorded as you issue material and labor to the job. When a job is complete, you can receipt it based on expected or actual costs and post any variances to the relevant ledger codes.

You can opt to enter material costs for the lowest level stock items manually against each bill, or transfer these costs automatically from the inventory warehouse costs. The Cost Implosion calculations are performed starting from the lowest level of the bill of material and take into account the various elements of production time, labor rates, productive units, economic batch quantities and scrap quantities and percentages.

Within the Bill of Materials module, you can also perform what-if costing, by changing elements of the bill of material costs and performing a what-if roll-up.

Within the Quotations module, estimates are held as bills of material for non-stocked items and you can perform various roll-ups to establish the cost of the made-in item.

Asset Capex System

The Capital Expenditure Budgetary and Control system (Capex system) is a sub system within the Fixed Assets module. The system will allow users to budget for, and manage Capital Expenditure items, for the current financial year, and future financial years. A Capex item could include one or more Capex requisition lines. Each Capex item will have a budget recorded against it, and as soon as Capex requisition lines are captured for the item, the system will record uncommitted, committed and spent balances against it. The user will be able to manage and control both Capex items and Capex requisition lines by status, being unapproved, approved, on hold, and closed. Once a requisition line is approved a Purchase Order or Works order can be raised for the item. On receipt it becomes a normal Asset.

Customer Success Stories

Jacto
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Jacto is a leading equipment provider to agricultural markets in the U.S., Brazil and 100 other countries…..

JACTO, US

The Challenges

When the business underwent an ownership transfer, Jacto lost its use of the existing Oracle ERP solution. Forgoing the corporate parent’s offer to extend its SAP deployment, and not interested in continuing on Oracle with its own license, the U.S. team began to search for their own ERP solution in 2009.

The Solution

The selection team reviewed multiple options, narrowed the list down to SYSPRO, Infor Distribution FACTS and QuickBooks. After a thorough review process, the company ultimately selected SYSPRO’s full suite of ERP distribution capabilities and implemented the solution within three months.

The Outcome

The most significant result of the SYSPRO implementation is the level of visibility that the system offers. The business is able to access meaningful data at a glance, with the option to drill down into the numbers and/or data that require additional information.

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