The metal fabrication industry has changed significantly during the past ten or even five years. Customers expect everything to be quicker, less expensive, and more sophisticated; therefore, the only way to succeed is to thoroughly understand and analyze everything in your shop in real time. A difficult task!
Today’s Fabricators must instantly synchronize all the moving pieces, including materials and suppliers, internal operations, job runs, machines, scheduling, maintenance, quality checks, tool maintenance, labor, inventory, work-in-progress (WIP), client requirements, and delivery timelines.
You must be meticulous, quick to adapt to market shifts, and open to new technology to succeed in this customer-driven world. Modern ERP software is the only method to improve lead times and affect your bottom line, regardless of your company’s focus on metal fabrication, metal supply, manufacturing, distribution, machining, or any other connected industry area.
It’s more complicated to select the best ERP software. How do you choose an ideal ERP system for your metal manufacturing company? Where will you find the time to investigate the possibilities that could support your business from now on.?
This blog aims at familiarizing you with what ERP software can and cannot achieve for your company. We are aware that this information is extensive. We at SCG Team want to enlighten you about ways to leverage NetSuite to benefit your manufacturing firm rather than overwhelm you. We are happy to serve the manufacturing industry and are confident that NetSuite has the resources to help your business succeed. No matter where you are in your journey, get in touch with us if you want further details on how we may help.
Let’s unfold the eight facts regarding Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that metal fabrication firms should be aware of.
1. ERP will solve most of your labor issues, but not all
There’s no need to sugarcoat that labor shortages are likely the most significant issue now affecting manufacturing. It has become nearly impossible to hire and keep dependable employees. Additionally, many experienced, talented workers appear to be retiring.
Due to a lack of experience and talent, employees are compelled to advance through the ranks more quickly than is usually necessary to fill open positions. Due to several issues, entry-level, semi-skilled occupations are difficult to fill in today’s labor market.
The good news is that a reliable ERP system comes with Human Capital Management (HCM). ERP Software is crucial because it may help you retain new hires and make the most of the personnel you already have. Sometimes referred to as a Human Resources Management System, HCM software (HRMS) is a collection of tools to support your employees’ hiring, training, management, and optimization.
The two most valuable resources in your business are people and money, which HCM manages. It provides tools for maximizing the talent and abilities you already have and can assist you in meeting your current and future staffing goals.
Employee engagement with you can also happen through HCM. It serves as a tool to advance workers’ responsibilities, skill sets, and careers. Employees leave organizations when they feel that management doesn’t care about them or if they feel that there is no room for them to advance in their careers. HCM is a method for maintaining worker engagement and motivation toward their future course.
HCM modules that have been carefully selected offer an opportunity to show employees that you care about their professional growth. Additionally, as skill sets and career routes are built for employees, their happiness rises, decreasing their likelihood of leaving.
HCM systems can use predictive workforce analytics to measure employee behavior. These key advantages of this method can support you to:
- Lower productivity or localized burnout
- Determine the top performances
- Evaluate prospective workers
- Determine the efficiency of various recruiting sources
- Manage employee feedback surveys for managers
- Project capacity and hiring requirements
- Hire internally or internationally
- Identify factors that affect employee performance.
Organizations may handle three crucial things with the aid of HCM components:
- labor optimization
- talent management
- talent acquisition.
Your HR department becomes a valuable business partner and aids you in making data-driven decisions about your workforce when HCM is utilized to the maximum.
Increased employee satisfaction, improved retention rates, more engaged staff, and more effective hiring are all possible outcomes. You won’t need to search far and wide for new personnel because satisfied employees are more likely to refer people to open opportunities. HCM can be a big assist, but it will only fix some of your labor issues.
2. ERP does inventory and scheduling management
What if demand and supply could be automatically balanced, ensuring that you have a product available when needed? One of the production’s most crucial (but challenging) tasks is managing inventory and its relationship to schedules. Simply improving scheduling might be a compelling argument for buying a new ERP system. As many manufacturers have discovered, better scheduling immediately correlates to shorter lead times and less money invested in inventory lying around waiting.
According to a recent NetSuite webinar, the following problems with inventory are the major ones that manufacturers face:
- Suppliers’ short or faulty shipments
- Lack of transparency and responsiveness in the supplier chain
- errors brought on by unconnected systems
- faulty demand forecasts
The ERP system from NetSuite tackles the challenges of inventory management and streamlines the inventory process by providing the following:
- coordinated tracking
- Transparency
- stock inspection
- Predicting demand with accuracy
- Preventive measures
Because it’s difficult for manufacturers to measure their available capacity, you can need help delivering orders on time. It can be particularly challenging in situations with an extensive product mix and various machine cycle times. Finding a complex solution to meet your needs without compromising usability has long been difficult. It is possible to schedule jobs realistically using NetSuite’s Production Scheduling tool.
Real-time scheduling has numerous advantages, including:
- Orders are automatically scheduled via a real-time engine.
- Advanced sequencing is made possible by flexible scheduling code.
- Scheduling for finite and infinite capacity under stated restrictions
- A variety of graphical timetable representations
- For manual override, drag & drop scheduled operations.
The ERP provides configuration for many aspects, including setup and run standards, lag and hold time, batch job configuration, asset and labor requirements, precise work instructions, and inspection plans and tolerances. This is because every fabricator has their own specific needs. Improved scheduling can be used to make the most of your resources.
3. Improved Cash Flow from ERP
Leveraging cash flow is a skill that successful manufacturers and metal fabricators possess. You know that expediting product distribution increases your cash outflow once you receive payment. As a result, you ensure that all processes, including receiving and shipping, move quickly. But then what? You must ensure that clients pay on time.
But how can you keep track of unpaid bills and handle everything manually? The ERP solution is equipped with modules to track receivables and other crucial accounting tasks that enhance cash flow.
Receivables collection is essential to your balance sheet. Businesses can easily and rapidly create and distribute invoices, specify credit conditions, and manage collections with the help of NetSuite accounts receivable (AR).
Receivables’ real-time insight allows you to organize the data as needed and examine the status of payments at any moment. NetSuite can generate digital invoices with various payment alternatives and automate laborious operations. You can view the earliest unpaid balances or sort them using multiple criteria.
- automate billing and data entry
- Improve the reconciliation of receivables.
- Obtain timely financial statements that are accurate and in compliance with national and international regulations.
- Make sure taxes are paid.
- Automate the collection and dunning notices to cut down on days sales overdue (DSO)
NetSuite ERP is a complete accounting solution that automates quote-to-order fulfillment, integrates planning and budgeting, and allows you to manage cash flow and revenue. You owe it to yourself to reevaluate your routines if you frequently rely on Excel spreadsheets or QuickBooks and spend many hours each day (or week or month) performing manual tasks.
Because it offers real-time visibility into customer aging, invoice analysis, repeating invoices, deferred and recognized revenue calculations, and gives you exception reports to indicate account abnormalities, NetSuite has a significant advantage over spreadsheets and QuickBooks. A robust ERP system can help you get paid more quickly and save time.
4. Asset Management Becomes Simpler
All companies are responsible for the condition and value of their fixed assets, including lost or useless things. As you presumably already know, it is nearly impossible to manually manage a physical inventory of expensive fixed assets while keeping an accurate valuation.
Of course, many fab businesses manually track assets in Excel, but this can be quite prone to error. The drawback of performing it improperly is that it may result in overpaid taxes and interest, regulatory fines, lost productivity, and time squandered.
By managing the whole asset life cycle, the NetSuite Fixed Asset Management solution gives you visibility and control. Everything from asset creation to asset appraisal, depreciation, and retirement can be managed in one location. With a customizable fixed asset calculation engine, the system offers a single version of the truth for all assets and full reporting capabilities.
Everything is automatically integrated with financials, so there is no need to maintain track of multiple systems. The system can generate accounting entries for tax reporting using different asset depreciation techniques. Every piece of equipment can be noticed like it can on a spreadsheet.
Fixed asset management enables you to:
- Oversee the entire asset lifecycle
- Accounting can be integrated.
- For compliance and reporting, maintain accurate records.
- Get rid of several spreadsheets.
- Utilize support for all common and unique depreciation techniques.
- Ensure adherence to lease accounting guidelines.
- Report the value, the expense, and the amortization.
Outdated data might result in overvaluation and overpayment, so update If you want to preserve accurate records that save time and money, assets management is crucial.
5. ERP for Metal Fabrication Enhances Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance is an essential element of production management. As a company that fabricates metal, you are aware that you must offer goods that satisfy both consumer requests and standards for both safety and quality.
Manufacturers must use quality capture and reporting to keep an eye on numerous aspects of the manufacturing process. ERP allows for monitoring standards, dashboards, reports, accurate data, and policies. It’s the most effective way to get reports and process management.
You can formalize and automate rules, standards, and procedures with the help of NetSuite Quality Management, allowing you to offer the highest quality with the least amount of administrative work. You can design policies for testing at receiving and throughout the production process, set parameters to analyze results, and quickly and simply choose the tests you wish to run.
NetSuite automatically instructs inspectors on what and when to test, gathers findings, and initiates remediation workflows as necessary. 297,696 federal regulations control the manufacturing sector, according to data published by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). You can be ready for the rules that apply to you even though you are probably exempt from them.
- Establish the sort of inspection to be carried out, the permitted limits, the inspector’s minimal credentials, and the category and manner of review. Measurements can be taken, requirements for inspector credentials can be enforced, and data can be compared to pass/fail thresholds.
- Receiving and In-Process Inspections – A specific item can be inspected immediately after delivery and even while it is being made. Tests can be connected to an object to guarantee conformity with quality-control processes because they have already been defined. Items that fail may be transferred to a holding area for additional processing.
- Mobile data collection – Using the optional tablet interface from NetSuite, test data may be collected and processed straight from the production floor or the receiving dock.
You’ll feel more assured when you have instant access to reporting data and can quickly request a file to view your previous records. Even making checklists in advance of scheduled visits might prove helpful. Create customized dashboards so you can quickly access whatever you need during an unforeseen visit.
Other software platforms “play well” with NetSuite. Many businesses have linked their inspection software to the ERP system to streamline these operations further.
6. Metal Fabrication ERP Improves Shop Floor Management
Manufacturing companies spend a lot of time on shop floor control. You must be able to determine whether you have the staff, expertise, and resources necessary to fulfill an order when it is placed. It takes a lot of time and effort for managers to try and forecast the future using planning and scheduling software, but this is only possible with data.
You may gather information necessary for precise scheduling by keeping track of what, where, when, why, and how your products are currently made. The Shop Floor Control and Mobility solutions from NetSuite make it easy to acquire this data throughout the manufacturing process quickly and accurately.
Shop floor control with NetSuite can give the real-time status of orders and materials anywhere in the shop. Additionally, it can plan and carry out the routings required to produce the good with the fewest bottlenecks or restrictions. The shop floor isn’t far away when you transfer data via the interactive tablet application from NetSuite and conventional barcoding.
Key Advantages:
- Robust, simple functionality improves data accuracy and user happiness.
- Updates in real-time for the information you need to make decisions
- Tablet software for consumers on the go
- Built from the ground up as a native application for advanced manufacturing
- Release materials, start production, track downtime, and pinpoint QC problems.
7. ERP For Metal Fabrication Enhances Customer Experience
Delivering world-class service is one of the finest ways to differentiate your company in today’s industry, where everyone has access to the same equipment and tools, and costs are competitive.
Your store’s unique selling point is the customer experience. You might be shocked at how devoted a customer can be if you take the time to treat each one individually. Every interaction can be memorable thanks to the NetSuite Customer Service Management module for internal or external clients.
- Improve client satisfaction by making it simple to access consumer information.
- Utilize Effective Self-Service to Cut Costs – Provide clients with a high-quality, high-touch service at a cheaper cost.
- Boost Productivity and Efficiency – Provide complete customer data insight for timely customer support.
- Drive Incremental Revenue – Improve Upselling and Cross-Selling
This aspect of the ERP software gives an enhancement that clients can see, in contrast to other improvements you’re doing that are more hidden from view. Their shopping experience is enhanced, and order processing takes less time.
A greater synergy between sales, processing, and the shop floor may be made possible by an ERP overhaul, which would also speed up the delivery of bids. Scheduling and order processing could become more automated. You can sell, process, and quote more quickly with an upgraded customer service interface, freeing up more time for business expansion.
- Assign, manage, and route customer support cases from inbound channels, including phone, fax, email, and the web. Keep track of support cases by product, problem, case category, partner, or client. Keep track of call resolution times, customer satisfaction, subscription renewals, call volumes, and trends to provide excellent customer service.
- Customer portal: Tracking order status, communications, and online self-service. Customers may be permitted to view and pay invoices or submit return authorizations without contacting assistance.
- Create a comprehensive, searchable knowledge base. Give clients and support representatives the tools they need to get the required information quickly. Allow users to submit online support cases if the results of their searches don’t provide the data they’re looking for.
8. For Metal Fabrication ERP, NetSuite + SCG Team Leads The Industry.
It has been reported that NetSuite is the industry’s best ERP system for manufacturing companies, especially for metal fabricators. “From the shop floor to the top level.” Since our company’s debut in 2014, SCG Team has been offering NetSuite solutions for metal fabricators since we have firsthand experience with the transformative effects NetSuite can have on a company.
In conclusion, taking Your Business to the next step can only become a reality if you have the right expertise to deliver outstanding solutions. At Seibert Consulting Group, we specialize in delivering modern solutions to businesses that aim at taking full advantage of the eCommerce platform. We always customize our solutions to align with Your Business’ requirements and goals. Let’s start talking about your project and find out how we can help Your Business grow. Get in touch with us via our chatbot or email at hello@seibertconsulting.com and via our direct line at 760-205-5440.
