SAP Business One for Manufacturing
SAP Software for Small & Midsize Manufacturers
What do companies look for in manufacturing ERP software? Whether operating a make-to-stock, make-to-order, configure-to-order, or engineer-to-order production environment, manufacturing companies are looking to optimize daily operations, remove waste, simplify processes, and improve manufacturing flexibility.
Across the board, small and midsize manufacturers have the same struggles:
- Using outdated systems for accounting and operations, and it is operationally weak
- Tracking lot numbers manually through spreadsheets
- Fighting with bad inventory management in their low-end accounting software
- Trying to track cost of goods sold on manufactured products
- Entering manufacturing order information manually between other systems, causing errors
In years past, large manufacturers had the advantage of software systems to automate their processes. Now, ERP software solutions are widely available for manufacturers of all sizes – and many small & midsize manufacturers are surprised to learn that SAP has solutions that are priced and sized for this market.
As a foundational business platform, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system provides integrated, streamlined, and automated processes for manufacturing.
When looking at manufacturing ERP software, these manufacturers want a software solution that will address their struggles, and meet these top priorities for the business:
- Manage CRM, sales orders, inventory and production in a single manufacturing ERP software system
- Better control raw and purchased inventory items, locations and quantities
- Control serial and lot numbers for incoming and outgoing products
- Gain insight into available to promise quantities
- Ability to grow into bar code scanning for incoming, in process and outbound products
- Use MRP to ensure raw material and purchased goods will meet production demand
- Can be deployed either on a server at their facility, or in the cloud
SAP Business One's Built-in Process for Manufacturers
SAP Business One simplifies definition and management of production, assembly, sales, and template bills-of-materials (BOM). You can store bill-of-materials number, description, warehouse, and item composition in easy steps, while recording per item quantities, production issue methods, prices, and comments at each level. When you add a bill-of-material to purchase, production, or sales orders, pricing and quantities are automatically recorded for both the product and its components.
SAP Business One also supports standard, special, and disassembly production orders. Bills-of-material can easily be entered into production orders so that item availability, warehouse location, and issue method are automatically recorded.
Material requirements planning (MRP) in SAP Business One allows you to plan material requirements for complex, multi-level production processes. Using the SAP MRP wizard, you can create MRP scenarios specifying planning horizon, items, and data sources. Once defined, MRP scenarios can be saved and reused for subsequent planning phases. The MRP module will automatically generate production and purchase orders needed to manufacture a final product in the quantities and time specified by the production schedule, taking into consideration all requirements for product components.
This strong manufacturing functionality is fully integrated into the financial and sales features – giving end-to-end visibility of the production process and real-time business data.
