Five ways manufacturers can benefit from a purpose-built ERP

As the manufacturing world rapidly evolves to meet new challenges, many organisations are working to define a new roadmap to success. But time isn't on the industry's side. As Deloitte noted in its outlook for 2022, "The manufacturing industry is building back fast, undeterred by significant labour and supply chain challenges. To maintain this momentum, manufacturers should navigate elevated risks while advancing sustainability priorities."

Early adopters are now more agile, flexible, and efficient - and they could already be making inroads into your share of the market. How can manufacturing organisations, like yours, counteract this risk and quickly drive profitable growth? The answer, for many, lies in technology partnerships.

Partnerships are increasingly important to achieving sustainable business growth, whether that's accessing data from upstream or downstream partners within your supply chain or turning to technology providers who can bring a wealth of insights about modern cloud capabilities and leading-edge innovations.

Manufacturing is shifting toward industry-specific applications, and these applications are now nearly always delivered in the cloud to maximise adoption, flexibility, visibility, data-driven decision-making, and security, as well as reducing through-life cost.

Benefits of industry-specific manufacturing ERP

Organisations are coming to realise that industry-specific capabilities built into the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution are critical for smooth deployment and headache-free implementation, as well as efficient workflows and reporting. Some key benefits include:

1. Industry-specific cloud ERP offers capabilities that match the way that you do (or should do) business. Proven best-practices are already built-in.
2. You can manage the end-to-end ecosystem with visibility and efficiency, operating in real time to unlock your organisation's potential. And because it's cloud-based, it's also faster to implement, so you'll see success more rapidly. For example, Camatic, the Australian seating manufacturer behind Sydney's relaunched Allianz Stadium, quickly stood up a new manufacturing facility in Malaysia - local requirements included.
3. An industry-centric, single view of your business helps you identify variations to expected operational performance early, so exceptions can be analysed and managed long before your finance teams would typically become aware of them. Your organisation can then focus on strategic operational and productivity improvement, fostering a continuous improvement mentality.
4. Gain the necessary level of visibility to quickly respond to customer, supplier, and regulatory needs - minimising the need for personalisations.
5. Leverage flexible, scalable architecture to be more agile and responsive to fast-changing customer expectations.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to triggering organisational change, the business drivers are often a complex mix of customer expectations and demands for a better buying experience, a focus on operational efficiencies and automation, and the need to meet industry regulations and compliance mandates. That's why it's important for your application software technology partner to offer solutions that are designed specifically for your industry. 

Manufacturing factories and plants have far different needs than service industries and shouldn't be expected to force generic applications to meet their unique requirements. As an example, managing the complexity of engineer-to-order or configure-to-order environments demand a single view of the product from concept through quote, build, delivery, and - often - on through to aftermarket service and warranty management. Anything less adds risk to the whole process.