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| | MRP Software used to
be expensive and aimed at only large manufacturers ... things have changed even
small manufacturers can now afford sophisticated MRP software at a fraction of
the price it used to be.
There are several Manufacturing orientated products that are now available
that integrate with Sage 50 Accounting software.
Some are made by Sage some by third parties. Third party
products tend to have integration with the accounting system which is less
slick, however, the people who develop these develop manufacturing software as
their core business and integrate with many different accounting packages.
Integrating with accounting packages is relatively simple, with the tools
available today and we offer a bespoke integration service for products that do
not yet have integration with Sage 50 Accounts.
There are lot of features available and few people need all of
them, you need to identify what is important to you in your scenario and find a
product that provide you with what you need.
To help you through this process we have made a list of all the
things you will want to consider an MRP checklist
What sort of manufacturing are you doing?
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Job Manufacturing - variable irregular and small batch manufacturing where the time and
costs need to be captured. Very useful for product development or if you make
special versions to order and need to control a lot of variable costs.
they types of thing people manufacture for which this sort of system is well
suited. Luxury Yachts, Customised Cars, Bespoke Tools, the main
feature of these is that whilst there are large common components, there is
always a variable element in parts and or labour that is normally estimated
in advance and quoted to a customer. These systems can't be used to
fix a quote after it has been given, however, they will help you find out
where things go wrong in quoting/estimating and enable you to quote better
in future.
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Batch manufacturing, if you make the same things time and time again this is the tool
for you. When you manufacture the same thing time and time again, you need to
control time and materials, you need to keep equipment and staff fully
loaded to get maximum productivity, you need to make sure that standard
times used are accurate and that production can meet or exceed the
wastage.
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Stock manufacturing, manufacturing to maintain a stock level
of finished goods.
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Manufacturing to Order, manufacturing goods to meet orders
as they are placed.
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Srock and to Order manufacturing need to scan you order
books and stock records to build up a picture of what needs to be made,
which you may then need to adjust to make a production plan.
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Time Recording, if you are batch manufacturing then knowing
how well people and machines are used is essential, using barcodes on job
sheets, swipe card and so on time can be easily recorded against jobs as
they progress through the workflow. in Job manufacturing, understanding
where time is over and under spent on work is the key to getting quoting
right and focusing resources to find solutions.
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Machine / Labour Production planning, with limited
resources, we can not put unlimited work through our facilities, we need to
plan our work and know our bottlenecks, perhaps add or divert resources at
times to keep up throughput.
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Sub contractors, many manufacturers use sub contractors for
parts of the manufacturing process, being able to cost and plan in this
element is essential.
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Materials, Planning your future material requirements is an
important aspect for some manufacturers, in electronics, there are
components that may be on lead times of 10 months or more, planning that far
ahead is beyond most companies because few have order books and
manufacturing planned that far ahead. However, materials planning should
make sure goods arrive in time for manufacturing and that stock levels of
materials and capital tied up in them are kept to economically optimised
levels.
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Suppliers of goods, alternative suppliers, supplier
ratings/selection, delivery times and the ripple effect created may all need
to be considered.
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Work flow paperwork, the job sheet is the core document for
manufacturing, it tells you what you are making and how much of it. It
references drawings, and may include special notes and ancillary
information. It provides a work flow list of operations to be carried out.
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Picking lists, the picking list gives the stores a list of
materials to assemble and possibly times and locations where they are
needed.
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Quality Control, returns, errors, inspection - If we were not human we would
not need this, but we are and we do, we can not help making mistakes,
however, we can understand mistakes, work out better ways to avoid them and
put a cost on them, but before we can do that we need to know where they
happen and how much they cost. Returns and control systems that feedback this sort of
information may be invaluable.
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Materials Traceability. Should a faulty or substandard
batches of materials be used then in some circumstances batches of product
made from those materials may need to be recalled, reworked, monitored or
tested. Tracking materials is an important part of manufacturing in
food and pharmaceuticals, where mistakes could obviously be a matter of life
and death
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Materials Testing / Inspection. Materials entering the
production process may need inspection and or testing prior to being
accepted. Allowing extra time and providing a quarantine mechanism for goods
prior to being made available to manufacturing is an important aspect for
those that need this.
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Bills Of Materials, the bill of materials is a recipe of
parts for manufacturing. These need to be flexible, perhaps allow for
the changing of and temporary substitution of parts.
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BOM Structures, sub assemblies within sub assemblies are a
common way of improving productivity, using common sub assemblies across a
range of products enables larger batches of sub assemblies to be made and
improve the efficiency. Having the ability to next sub assemblies with
in sub assemblies within finish goods is essential for some manufacturers,
where software needs to deal with the need to manufacture a large batch of
sub assemblies because a small batch of finish product has been ordered.
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Flexibility. Sometimes we need to compromise efficiency, we
need to build less than optimal batches of sub assemblies in order to meet
customer deadlines or to reduce capital investment, so having made fixed
rules you might also need to be able to break them in a casual way without
changing the underlying rule. Alter a batch, add in an extra job.
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Costing. We need to be able to find out the cost of
items depending on batch size, if a customer order 1000 or 10000 might make
a big difference to our production costs, being able to re-use the
manufacturing information to work out the costs is essential to finding
optimal batch sizes in batch manufacturing. With Job manufacturing we
need to estimate the additional time and materials needed for each job and
build an estimate fromt he ground up, using the "standard" product
as a basis.
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Multi Warehousing, Sage does not provide for multiple
warehouses, using a simple BOM product and multiple warehouses (one being
the manufacturing plant) simple manufacturing functionality can be got for
minimal costs.
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Serial numbers and tracking, assemblies, and components may
have serial numbers that may need to be tracked, finish goods also may need
to have serial numbers assigned and passed to other systems for future
tracking.
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Stock control, enhanced counting, using rolling stock takes,
structured counts, mobile equipment and bar codes.
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Tooling costs, you may have tools that have limited life or
that need remanufacturing, recalibrating after an amount of use these costs
may need to be added on to the cost of manufacture.
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Machine maintenance, machines need preventative maintenance,
calibration and inspection, this down time may need to be planned, the cost
of it may need to be amortised and so on.
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Emergency planning. A core machine goes down, and the
plant will grind to a halt, what can you make without this equipment and
without huge piles of part finish goods piling up.
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Additional Information Request Form
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