Manufacturers across the world are striving hard to minimize costs, elevate profits, and increase customer base by providing more value to the customers.
They try and achieve this by eliminating waste, optimizing the flow, producing what customers want and when they want it, continuous improvement, and respect for people. All this ultimately lay the foundation for lean manufacturing. Before diving deeper, let us quickly recall the concept of Lean Manufacturing.
What is Lean Manufacturing?
Lean Manufacturing is systematic approach and philosophy aimed at minimizing manufacturing waste and maximizing customer satisfaction and value. It is derived from Toyota Production System and is now being accepted rapidly across the world. At the core, the principle lay emphasis on removing the processes, activities or actions that do not add value to the customers, or increase wastes. Its aim is to enhance efficiency and bring customer satisfaction at the forefront.
Benefits Drawn Out of Lean Manufacturing:
By implementing Lean manufacturing an organization can draw out the following benefits:
- Productivity improvement
- Quality Improvement
- Cost Reduction
- On-time delivery
- Safety improvement
- Morale enhancement
- Environment improvement
In order to achieve that, organizations are constantly trying to increase productivity and quality.
An Enterprise Resource Planning is a great ally of organization in achieving this goal. The software provides huge data, which can be utilized to cut down waste, improve productivity and enhance customer satisfaction.
Let us discuss various areas where ERP can help principles of lean manufacturing to achieve the desired results:
Downtime– With integration of IoT and ERP, predictive analysis becomes easier. Organizations can identify the need of repair or probable breakdown in advance and can connect the production line with other machine as a makeshift arrangement. This helps organizations with reducing probable production halts due to downtime.
This ERP intervention upholds lean manufacturing principles by avoiding time, resource wastage and affects positively on customer satisfaction by in-time delivery of product.
Inventory optimization and control – Lean manufacturing emphasizes on pull production. That means when one article is produced only then another will be produced (Just-In-Time Production). This principle reduces inventory requirement in warehouse.
An ERP software can provide centralized database where it can store all data such as inventory levels, production schedules, and manufacturing resources. The data helps organizations to keep inventory level enough to facilitate production or order fulfilment and avoid overstocking or understocking, as per the requirement. Â Â Â
This control and optimization of inventory via ERP software helps organization to grab all opportunities at one hand and avoid waste at other hand.
Waste reduction– There are various waste in a production. Lean principles upholds the philosophy of minimizing waste.
With lean manufacturing principles and ERP at place, wastes can be reduced a lot.
Lead time calculation data provided by ERP can avoid production halts or delays and improve usability of available resources, which otherwise might go waste (expired, in case of process manufacturing)
Since ERP can calculate various costs, including labour cost, overhead cost, raw material cost etc., organizations can calculate and observe extra cost involved and cut it down.
Better decision making– With lean manufacturing principles and ERP software at play, organizations can make better decisions regarding production processes.
Since ERP provides real time information, manufacturing organizations can take better decisions regarding production schedules, inventory levels, and resource allocations.
Accurate real time data helps organizations take decisions faster by identifying demands and adjust production schedules accordingly.
This enhances customer satisfaction or value observed by customer.
Customer communication- ERP is loaded with CRM module. With the help of this, organization can establish an effective communication with customers, can gauge their requirements, and can address their complaints. This smooth communication builds a stronger relation or organization and customer which eventually builds customers’ trust and brand loyalty.
Increased responsiveness- Market changes very fast. Customers’ demands change very quickly. By integrating ERP with Lean manufacturing, organizations can respond to the changes immediately.
With streamlined processes, reduced lead times, and well-organized production schedules organizations can change their production according to the demands in the market. They can do this without increasing the wastage.
They can continuously improvise and make changes and further improve their processes and supply chains to provide better customer satisfaction and value.
Conclusion:
Lean Manufacturing and ERP are getting traction in the modern world of manufacturing. Having both at your end, can make the path to progress smooth. But not all ERP software make a good partner!
Only the one with specific capabilities and features can be the ones to count upon. When it comes to process manufacturing, BatchMaster ERP is the one to rely. Not only because it has more than 40 years of experience in the field, but also because the solution has industry-specific comprehensive capabilities to address nuanced intricacies.
With What-If analysis, detailed reports, real-time batch adjustments, multiple UOMs, formula versioning and security, compliance assistance, expiry date/shelf life tracking, bi-directional lot traceability, and lot more, it helps to reduce waste, enhance customer satisfaction, optimize workflows and embraces the objectives of lean manufacturing.
So, if you are a process manufacturer and looking forward to amplify your business by assimilating lean manufacturing and ERP solution, BatchMaster ERP is the one to consider. Reach out to us on sales@batchmaster.co.in.
