Manufacturing consultants Tim Grant (Business Solution Providers), David Altemir (Altemir Consulting), and Patrick Verryn (Move2Cloud) share common challenges experienced by small manufacturers.
1. Managing bills of materials (BOMs)
A recurring challenge is managing and understanding BOMs, especially when dealing with products that have multiple variants, engineering changes, or complex assembly processes. This complexity can lead to errors and inefficiencies in production planning and inventory management.
“Many of our clients have gotten stuck when trying to create BOMs,” says Patrick Verryn.
“It is especially difficult to turn engineering BOMs into manufacturing BOMs, and transferring changes as the design evolves,” David Altemir adds.
2. Inventory accuracy
Many small manufacturers struggle with keeping accurate inventory records. The consultants emphasize the need for transaction recording to manage inventory effectively. Without this, manufacturers face persistent issues with inventory discrepancies, which can lead to stockouts, overstocking, and increased operational costs.
“Not being able to keep accurate inventory is a common issue clients come to me with,” David Altemir states. “This always proves to be an operational issue within the company, most often a lack of transactional discipline.”
3. Understanding production capacity
According to the consultants, small manufacturers have difficulty determining how much they can produce at any given time. This leads to customers being promised unrealistic lead times as production bottlenecks start to slow down processes. To mitigate this, manufacturers need solutions explicitly made to tackle these issues.
“Specialised software gives manufacturers an immediate understanding of what can be realistically accomplished within given timelines,” says Tim Grant. “Without it, small manufacturers will continue to struggle with their production and delivery schedules.”
4. Integrating business data
Integrating various operational functions and eliminating data silos is essential for businesses that want to scale up efficiently. This integration, often involving several different applications, is crucial for improving efficiency and responsiveness in manufacturing operations. However, many small businesses are bogged down by legacy systems and bad data.
“Our clients know how to produce things; they are experts at that,” Tim Grant maintains. “But they also acknowledge their lack of experience with software, especially when it comes to integrating multiple applications.”
5. Actual costing
Understanding your actual costs is critical for pricing products, finding financial sinkholes, and ensuring profitability. The process of actual costing calls for meticulous tracking of material lot prices, labour costs, and overheads. Maintaining such detailed records in spreadsheets, however, can soon become overwhelming.
“Often our customers don’t even realise that actual costing is possible,” David Altemir says. “That’s understandable because there aren’t many solutions available to small manufacturers that offer actual costing.”
The solution: MRP software
Having completed hundreds of software consultation projects between them, Grant, Altemir, and Verryn have one thing in common: they all recommend manufacturing resource planning (MRP) software for overcoming common small manufacturing challenges. They also favour one solution in particular – MRPeasy.
