7 Growth Strategies for Modern Manufacturing
Manufacturers should concentrate on their core competencies: producing superior products and delivering exceptional customer service to stimulate growth. The last thing on their minds should be their ERP software or connected business applications. In this blog, we’ll walk you through how a cloud-native ERP application like Acumatica can help you stimulate growth.
Strategies for Manufacturing Growth
1. Boost Your Growth by Improving Manufacturing Efficiency
The complexity of manufacturing often causes inefficiencies. Improper machine or tooling setup can result in excess scrap, while jobs that commence without upstream materials can tie up valuable resources.
Acumatica Manufacturing Edition provides an integrated suite of applications designed to drive out inefficiency through automation and actionable business insights.
- Acumatica platform supports artificial intelligence and machine learning in manufacturing to automate redundant, predictable, and manual processes, saving time and improving data accuracy.
- Hard allocations can be used to identify critical material issues and ensure materials are available for production before the job is scheduled.
- Optimize your shop floor by implementing RFID tags, bar codes, and warehouse automation technologies. Doing so will enable you to capture data more quickly and accurately.
2. Streamline Processes with Connected Supply Chains
Manufacturers who rely on outdated ERP systems face significant hurdles when gathering critical information. They have to resort to using disconnected systems such as email, fax, and phone to make informed choices regarding product design, purchasing, production, and orders.
Acumatica is a collaborative platform that connects your business with its customers, dealers, and partners, resulting in enhanced efficiency across all areas of your business.
- Acumatica's ERP system has an embedded CRM system, providing a 360-degree view of customers, dealers, and suppliers. This includes access to invoices, order history, estimates and quotes, opportunities, and account contact information.
- Acumatica Commerce Edition includes everything you need to attract customers, dealers, or distributors, including up-sell and cross-sell features.
- With unlimited user licenses, Acumatica provide access to customers, dealers, and vendors to securely view the information in their ERP system restricted to their respective accounts, products, projects, and orders.
3. Generate More Leads & Close More Business
Manufacturers face challenges in improving sales due to the complexity of their products and services. They may rely on estimates, have limitations with internal systems or disconnected eCommerce applications, and struggle to develop more qualified business opportunities.
Acumatica provides all the tools manufacturers need to help them sell more products and services.
- Manage estimates through the quote and order conversion process with full opportunity cycle management.
- Empower customers, dealers, and distributors to place orders with confidence through Acumatica's secure online system.
- With marketing automation, you no longer need to worry about handling marketing lists, email campaigns, sales collateral, webinars, website landing pages, marketing analytics, and more.
4. Provide Exceptional Service to Customers
Customers often select suppliers based on the services they provide to complement their products. As a result, top manufacturers nowadays offer installation, repair, maintenance, and other related services for many of their core products.
Acumatica’s CRM and field service systems provide the ideal platform for providing world-class services to grow your business.
- Acumatica offers a suite of field service applications offers comprehensive solutions for managing service contracts and warranties, technician scheduling, dispatch, and depot repair.
- The CRM application comprises of a service and support case management system that enables you to monitor and deal with issues related to the customer's experience.
- With Acumatica's service management capabilities, manufacturers can organize preventive maintenance for their internal assets. This helps to reduce any disruptions to schedules and delivery dates.
5. Optimize Inventory for Maximum Profits
With Acumatica inventory management and manufacturing suite, you can optimize inventory levels, automate processes, and implement just-in-time strategies. This will save you time and boost inventory turnover, making your business operations smoother and more efficient.
- Manage safety stock levels, set up complex pricing, gain insights into inventory valuation, and set up replenishment parameters such as reorder points, shelf life, seasonality, and demand formulas.
- MRP evaluates all material demand including customer orders, dependent manufacturing orders, and warehouse transfers. It also evaluates supply including existing stock and open purchase orders, transfers, and orders.
- Take advantage of Acumatica Warehouse Management to automate various tasks such as picking (wave and batch), packing, shipping, inventory movements, and physical inventory.
6. Manage Compliance & Risk Effectively
Acumatica offers a variety of tools to help you meet compliance standards, with database level security, audit files, security roles, wikis, and document management all aiding in your quality control and compliance efforts.
- Comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), IRS sales tax requirements, Payment Card Industry (PCI) credit card requirements, and more.
- Acumatica provides the platform and tools to help manage some or all industry compliance initiatives. Compliance can be a requirement to win and retain customers or a competitive advantage over non-compliant competitors.
- Acumatica security measures ensure that employees can carry out their tasks in a timely manner, while also limiting access to information through internal controls.
7. Minimize Technology Costs
Most traditional ERP vendors have strict and expensive user licensing, which can limit your options and lock you into long-term contracts. If you decide to leave, you risk losing your data and being bound to the financial burden of your contract. In contrast, Acumatica offers unique licensing and all the benefits of using a native cloud application, ensuring flexibility and security for your company.
- Acumatica is the only major ERP publisher with unlimited user licensing. That’s right – add as many users as you need, including customers, vendors, and consultants.
- You never have to manage backups or off-site backup storage. You never have to physically upgrade your system. And you don’t even need a database administrator or other costly IT resources.
- For cloud-hosted customers, there is nothing to install and the software comes pre-configured with many of the default settings other ERP vendors simply don’t provide.
Conclusion
The manufacturing industry is a challenging one, dealing with increased competition, shorter product lifecycles, complex technologies, and changing compliance mandates. How can you navigate and grow your business in this digital age when there are so many variables to consider? The answer is simple: equip yourself with a comprehensive suite of scalable business applications like Acumatica Cloud ERP.
