Make-to-Order ERP Systems

The world of manufacturing is quickly transforming to one in which they have the ability to produce a lot of one or a lot of thousands, depending on the needs of their customer. If you’re a make-to-order manufacturer, you may be handling a lot of different variations of the following concepts:

• Assemble-to-order or build-to-order: stocked parts or buy-to-order parts, then built based on order demand and usually shipped from job.
• Configure-to-order: the buyer specifies the components needed for the product and often engineering change revisions occur.
• Engineer-to-order: designing and manufacturing one-off orders for the customer, often times these are called Project Jobs
• Custom manufacturing: the creation of standard and custom products provided in time to meet shipping deadlines

With all of the possibilities involved in the made-to-order manufacturing arena, you need an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that can handle and support them all. Make-to-order (MTO) Epicor ERP software has the flexibility you need to quickly manufacture the goods that have been ordered as soon as the order has been placed and confirmed.

Buyers of MTO / CTO / ETO products have high expectations. You must be able to provide them with all the benefits of ordering their products through an online store. Some of the ways a make-to-order Epicor ERP can help you meet their expectations include:

• Customer relationship management: Get a 360-degree view of every customer relationship and provide your team the ability to access that information even while they’re away from the office through remote access to scheduling, inventory, and quoting tools. Additionally, your ERP system will provide your customers with the ability to configure, place, and track orders themselves.
• Bill of Materials: Epicor ERP has a deep Bill of Materials (BOM) which allows for proper part configuration (Method of Manufacturing) and accounts for all the complexities required by MTO and ETO manufacturers.
• Planning and scheduling: Know the real-time status of every order you have in production at once. This provides you with a superior operational oversight that assists you in meeting deadlines, address problems in the process, adjust workflows, run “what if” scenarios, capabilities tracking, and even utilize collaboration within your team through a social networking tool. Your Make to Order ERP system must be able to incorporate manufacturing-centric tools into planning and scheduling to enable a streamlined process that ensures that your customers receive products that are on time and of the highest quality possible.
• Accurate quoting: Being able to provide made-to-order manufacturing options to your customers is dependent on the ability to deliver accurate price quoting. Due to the specialized products involved (sometimes single use items) and the labor that is required to make them, successful made-to-order manufacturing requires the ability to understand how much products cost, mark-up potential, and to help you budget your labor accordingly.
• Product Cost: Labor and materials tracking combined with Epicor’s costing workbench enables manufacturers to have true Product Cost insight. Prevent cost overruns and decreased profit margins by being able to review, identify, and fix quality issues during production, identify opportunities to lower your costs of production, and ultimately set accurate product cost.
• Project management: Integrated project management to allow for phase planning and budgeting, keeping everything in one digital location for your project managers to track: task management, variance change orders, invoices, purchasing, sales orders, and even manufacturing job views and project-based scheduling.
• Advanced analytics: 24/7 access to real time data during production can inform and supply your decision making with backed metrics – even when those decisions must be made on the fly.
• Serialization process: Most manufacturing software fails to address the important aspect of serializing your finished product and its components. Your ERP must be able to handle the serialization process, as well as returns and warranties.
• Support for single-site, multi-site, and global operations: Whether you’re a big or small manufacturer, you deserve a manufacturing ERP software that can handle your business and keep your team connected, no matter how much distance there is between them.

Epicor has more than 45 years of working with manufacturers, which has provided them with a lot of insight into the tools these manufacturers need to improve the collaboration, visibility, and results needed to keep up with the made-to-order offerings their customers demand. Epicor’s ERP solution has multiple deployment methods and is cloud-ready, it can be used as a SaaS solution or is available to be deployed as a hosted solution.

For more information about what Epicor’s Make-To-Order ERP system can do for you, contact us.