Bottom Line:  An ERP for small business makes the most of every growth opportunity by improving end-to-end visibility across every shop floor while controlling costs, production schedules, and delivery dates, freeing up more time for short-notice production runs.

Offering short-notice production runs to customers is one of the most proven strategies for growing a small to midsize manufacturing business at scale. To become competitively strong enough to do that, small and midsize manufacturers need to have end-to-end visibility of their shop floors combined with real-time production and process monitoring data. The insights from real-time production and process data provide the most valuable information across production. That’s not possible to achieve just using Microsoft Excel as a production scheduler and QuickBooks for financials. A sure sign it’s time to migrate away from those personal productivity tools to an ERP system when QuickBooks crashes because of too many transactions and fails to scale and keep up with growth, so there’s no visibility into how shop floor decisions drive bottom-line results. DELMIAworks ERP is purpose-built for small and midsize manufacturing businesses to take on these challenges and more and keep growing.

Gaining Scale & Speed With an ERP for Small Business that Provides End-To-End Visibility

Knowing how each production decision impacts profits, including how Capable-To-Promise commitments change and impact which short-notice production runs are available in real-time, makes any business more competitive. There’s always the chance to turn time into a competitive advantage for small and mid-tier manufacturers over their larger, slower-moving competitors.

Turning speed into a competitive strength starts with end-to-end visibility.  Speed, exceptional product and service quality, and a reputation for customer responsiveness are among the strongest competitive weapons any small to midsize manufacturer has today. Outflanking and outrunning competitors can only happen if there’s accurate end-to-end visibility. Not relying on 3^rd party connectors or adapters to keep shop floor teams up to date on orders alleviates production downtime from systems not communicating with each other.  The purpose-built design of the DELMIAworks ERP platform and its support for 28 pre-built manufacturing types have evolved over decades of development to provide shop floor to top floor visibility and control of manufacturing operations. It’s the only platform with its ERP and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) integrated, relying on a single database for all applications.

Scaling Up For Growth’s Challenges   

The faster a small to midsize manufacturer wants to grow, the more they’ll face the challenges of taking on more complex projects and the transactions that go with them. Choosing which complex projects to take on and which to let go of is key in growing any manufacturing business. Relying on Excel or QuickBooks alone isn’t going to deliver those insights.

Thankfully the combination of financial and real-time production reporting in DELMIAworks can help simplify the decision by identifying which types of projects are the best fit for a given production center. Add to that support for multi-site financial reporting and analysis, and the accurate scale of DELMIAworks to help small and midtier manufacturers scale up is straightforward.  Additional ways DELMIAworks ERP can help any small to midsize business achieve greater scale with more accurate, adaptive, and financially sound intelligence include the following:

• More real-time, responsive customer service. Accuracy, speed, and responsiveness keep customers coming back and are the most powerful growth catalyst any business has. It has to start with end-to-end visibility, achieved at scale on a solid platform. Over 1,100 manufacturers rely on DELMIAworks to provide the information their customers need to keep buying and fueling growth.

• Improved Capacity Planning and Scheduling. When capacity planning and scheduling get too complex for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and workbooks, it’s time to consider an ERP system. Achieving greater coordination, collaboration, and communication across manufacturing is one of the many factors that drive manufacturers off of running their operations with Microsoft Excel and onto DELMIAworks. Balancing inbound customer demand and meeting order shipments dates makes capacity planning and scheduling a must-have in any ERP system today.

• Greater Pricing Accuracy and Profitability. By integrating cost-based and accrual-based accounting workflows into the core areas of an ERP system, it’s possible to see precisely how pricing decisions impact long-term profits and the ability to compete.

• Improve Supplier Quality and Delivery Performance. When production operations run using Microsoft Excel or QuickBooks, Supplier Quality and Quality Management systems suffer. It’s because ERP systems increase efficiency and help reduce the costs of bad quality. In addition, when an ERP system is integrated across production operations, it’s much easier to see the impact of decisions on overall quality and compliance performance.

Conclusion

Setting the strategy for faster growth starts by looking at how more complex projects and their transactions can be managed at scale. What worked for the startup, small or midsize manufactuer in the past isn’t going to work today. Microsoft Excel, QuickBooks, and homegrown production scheduling apps can’t scale to manage the complexities of customer demands today. ERP systems can and are providing this today.

Managing operations more efficiently with an ERP solution can directly improve company productivity and add value for customers. In addition, relying on the systems built on a single platform as DELMIAworks helps streamline customer support by pushing information and insights throughout an organization.