How Off The Shelf ERP Keeps Your IEM Budget On The Shelf

As each new year approaches, so do questions of complexity for industrial equipment manufacturers.

It should come as no surprise that these questions are almost always rooted deep within budgetary concerns. Could an Enterprise Resource Planning system be the answer?

Our marketing department recently posted Building Within Budget to Microsoft Dynamics Community.

Within, they cited survey results from 251 senior level industrial equipment manufacturers recently gathered by the Economic Intelligence Unit.

Among the responses provided by these executives when asked how they suggest building within budget, and in so doing, provide the best opportunity to increase razor-thin profit margins:

• Understand the importance of good oversight

• Ensure project managers report directly to senior executives

• Implement strong, proven project management methodologies

On the surface, these responses may not sound complex.  Fundamentally, these responses suggest that operations be transparent and built around proven best practices.  Heavy complexity does come into play, however, when we take into account global operations, thousands of vendors and stakeholders, and how the slightest delay anywhere in the supply chain that can ripple into a dangerous shrink in margin.

All of a sudden, implementing simple best practices requires an unprecedented level of insight.  And this is where an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system becomes a vital solution.

What the right ERP system will do is provide everyone within an organization insight and oversight into every aspect of a project being managed.  An ERP system for industrial equipment manufacturers can be customized to automatically generate progress reports or provide triggers to the right executives based on risk factors such as project overage markers.

Having worked with complex manufacturing companies for years, and having just used the word custom to describe ERP, I find it very odd that in the very next breath I am using the phrase ‘off-the-shelf.’

That said, because our company has worked so extensively with manufacturers, the solutions we offer are designed to need very little customization.  Our solutions are vertically oriented, and are built from the ground-up to support the end-to-end processes and best practices you know need to be implemented to more effectively manage complexity and control budget.

It’s important to note that I am not suggesting software will be your savior in the new year. Manufacturing and project management success is a result of strong process and proven methodology – two concepts you will never find packed neatly into a box.

But what software can offer is a new level of efficiency and fewer wasted resources – in other words, a much better chance of achieving higher margins – whether your operations stretch across the street or across the globe.  And in the new year, amazingly, a solution almost completely built around your needs can be pulled off the shelf.

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If you are a manufacturing company that is considering an ERP solution, contact To-Increase for a complimentary consultation.