HOW CAN AN ERP ENABLE AGILE MANUFACTURING?

Agile Manufacturing is the ability to respond to market changes in a swift and nimble manner. Agile Manufacturing is the key ingredient for the survival of any Manufacturing business which is prone to changes in market demands. Manufacturers who can adapt to market changes in a jiffy without compromising on the quality of production often rule their respective industries.

ERP Software can help manufacturers forge Agile Manufacturing in almost every kind of industry having virtually any kind of demand. ERP Solutions can also help manufacturers reduce the lead time of various processes, optimize inventory and forecast market demands.

Most of the small to mid sized manufacturing companies rely on their accounting software as the only system to manage everything in their company. Although it works well for some of them, it clearly fails to offer insights required for Strategic Planning and Forecasting market trends. On the other side, a well-integrated ERP Solution can churn data from different departments and Big Data to produce valuable insights into future market demands and can help the management to make informed decisions.

An ideal Agile Manufacturing possesses the ability to quickly respond to market demands like increasing Production due to an upcoming festival or decreasing the Production due to falling in demand due to rise in inflation. The Agile Manufacturer is even able to make changes to the product based on the feedback from the consumers. It is only an integrated ERP Solution that can enable manufacturers to have this kind of flexibility and agility in handling sudden demand changes. A modern ERP is loaded with all the necessary features which forge agility such as Capacity Planning and Materials Planning.

Most of the small and mid sized manufacturing companies fail to innovate as their human resource is stuck in tedious processes and hardly gets time for enterprising activities like Product Design or Sales. Cost-effective ERP Solutions can pull out manufacturers from such stagnation by automating processes and functions that don’t necessarily require any human element. Also, the agility of the manufacturing operations is compromised due to the manual tracking processes, as they bring up unwanted occurrences like data duplication. A comprehensive ERP Solution can provide an integrated ecosystem which can help enterprises avoid data duplication, thus ensuring data integrity.

Agile Manufacturing not only prevents losses due to changes in the market demand but also helps to serve a variety of customers with different types of demand by the custom manufacturing process. In yesteryears, organizations could run well even without an ERP System since market demands were regular and standard. For some financial applications could fulfill the work of an ERP whereas some opted for much specific MRP (Manufacturing Resource Planning) Solutions. However, in today’s volatile markets, every manufacturer needs to have a robust and highly integrated ERP Solution in place which enables them to sail swiftly through any kind of market turbulence.