NGR's Blog

Manufacturing processes have evolved significantly over the last 40 to 50 years.  Gone are the days when it was common practice to produce items in bulk, only to be stored in inventory until they were needed.

The primary objectives of a production facility during that time were:

• To keep employees busy
• To keep production up
• To minimize variations in standard products
• The industry has changed quite a bit since then.  Today's environment of rapidly changing and variable products recognizes that excess inventory means reduced liquid capital and obsolete materials. Why have money tied up in products that aren't being used?

The industry has shifted towards dramatic reductions in work in process levels, avoiding the wasteful expenditure of resources and increasing manufacturing efficiency. A key feature in these improvements is the Multi-Level Bill of Material.

Managing a business can be quite demanding so it is essential to have the right systems in place to help you run it as efficiently and effectively as possible. One way to ensure you do this is to have the right business management software in place.

Essentially what you need is a system that gives you access to accurate, real-time financial, accounting and business management data.  It should be flexible enough to enable you capitalise on the latest technological advancements. It must include some sort of customer relationship management to ensure you can offer superior customer service.  It needs to be adequately supported by your provider for when issues arise.  And finally, your system needs to be able to grow and adapt with your ever-changing business needs and processes.

Global supply chains can increase efficiency, but they can also increase risk. Recent events—including the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the floods in Thailand and the ash clouds caused by the Icelandic volcano—have demonstrated how far the consequences of such risks can extend. The Japanese earthquake, for example, severely affected global electronics production and led to extended business disruptions for the automotive industry.

The Thai flooding created significant shortages in the hard disk drive market that generated millions of dollars of losses for well-known electronics manufacturers. In addition to these headline events, however, the nature of supply chain risk is constantly changing. New risks and new vulnerabilities can often be better addressed if given close attention from management.

In this blog, we will discuss how project centric engineered to order products and complex build to order products can benefit from being managed by supply chain software set up entirely in the cloud.

First, lets discuss companies dealing with project centric engineered to order products. A recent article in Industry Week gives a perfect example for this type of situation. The story starts with a European company servicing an oil exploration. The company serviced the exploration by delivering large project specific vales and gears. These projects typically took the company years to complete due to the extremely high potency of constant delays. This forced the company to end up manufacturing gears and having to hold them in stock as the project timeline continues to slip.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the only driver for cloud computing adoption was cost saving. In actual fact there are numerous benefits of cloud computing driving its adoption worldwide.

Research from Gartner forecasts that cloud computing will make up 20% of all IT budgets in 2012.

Growth in cloud-based business solutions is usually credited to its lower total cost of ownership (TCO) delivered when compared with traditional on-premise models. Certainly the cost savings available to business taking up cloud computing were an invaluable marketing tool, particularly against the economic backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis in the late 2000s. But whilst cost effectiveness is a compelling reason for its adoption, there are many other equally persuasive advantages offered by the technology.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is a core system for mid-sized businesses and above in many industries, particularly those with manufacturing and inventory management requirements. Here’s a quick overview of some important ERP benefits that your business can achieve.