Overview
The aerospace industry is responsible for designing, manufacturing, operating and maintaining civil, military and dual-use aircraft (aircraft designed for commercial use that can also be modified for defense use), spacecraft and their respective parts such as engines, flight instruments and landing gears. Aerospace manufacturing is an industry that produces "aircraft, guided missiles, space vehicles, aircraft engines, propulsion units, and related parts," according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site. Most of the aerospace industry is geared toward governmental work and the industry is vital to the defense industry and national security.   In the United States, the Department of Defense and NASA are the two biggest consumers of aerospace technology and products. The BLS reported that the aerospace industry employed 444,000 wage and salary jobs in 2004. Most of those jobs were in Washington and California.  Aerospace accounts for 1/3 of all manufacturing jobs added nationwide since 2005.

The aerospace industry relies heavily on electronics. Frequent advances in electronics bring about continual changes in the industry. CAD and CAM (Computer Aided Design and Manufacture) have brought about major changes in aircraft production and the time required for an operation has been cut; sometimes by more than half.  Investment in R&D (Research and Development) has introduced new materials and advances in the understanding of aerodynamics. In turn, this has helped to improve the performance and efficiency of aircraft.

Aerospace sales in the United States hit a record level in 2005 as the industry's three main sectors -- civil aviation, defense, and space -- all showed strength convergence, according to AIA (Aerospace Industries Association).   Aerospace remains one of the most important cogs in the U.S. economy, registering a positive trade balance of $37 billion.  Aerospace is one of the few manufacturing sectors of the economy that consistently shows a foreign trade surplus and posted the highest positive balance of all industry categories in 2004.

Industry Challenges

• Increasing global competition and consolidations or complex industrial alliances
• Dynamic, constantly changing and competitive market
• Need for customer management and continued reach
• Highly competitive and dynamic market that requires collaboration and cooperation between companies in the industry
• Need to control costs, while remaining flexible and responsive
• Provide higher quality of goods and services, more efficiently
• Need to shorten time to market
• Need to provide support for complex equipment maintenance, repair and overhaul
• Need for extensive fleet management capabilities
• Need to introduce and manage new technologies
• Need for extensive integrated supply chain due to complex supplier network
• Need to fully document the control and manage of products and processes
• Need to manage and control complex contracts and all associated projects

How SYSPRO Can Help

Engineering Change Control
The Engineering Change Control process is a user-definable workflow enterprise sub-system. It can augment or even replace the paper trail that usually accompanies any changes to product design data. By providing mechanisms, audit trails and archives, Engineering Change Control functionality gives manufacturers ready access to documentation on prior product versions. In this manner, the manufacturer has the ability to address questions relating to product defects in older product versions. Comprehensive ECC documentation also enables manufacturers to easily revert to the production of prior product versions, if necessary, to suit the requirements of a particular customer or conform to regulatory requirements.

Engineering Change Control (ECC) helps you improve the management of engineering changes to your products. It achieves this through various features and processes - the essence of which is the Engineering Change Order process (ECO) process. The Engineering Change Order process is a workflow type subsystem, intended to replace the paper trail that typically accompanies any changes to product design data. If a product is under the control of ECC, then any maintenance to a bill of material and/or routing of the product can be accomplished only by means of a current ECO.

Engineering Change Orders enables users to:

• Assign product design tasks to particular users (or groups of users)
• Transfer tasks between users (or groups of users)
• Notify users of new tasks
• Remind users of outstanding tasks
• Sign off engineering changes electronically

Lot Traceability
The SYSPRO Lot Traceability module is designed to provide full traceability at transactional level for items which could cause loss of life or limb if conformance to quality standards is not adhered to. This enables you to maximize quality control through the tracking and replacement of any defective materials and manage product recalls efficiently and effectively. You can choose between numeric or alphanumeric lot numbering and if numeric, whether the numbers must be assigned manually or automatically.

Companies in highly regulated industries for safety or health compliance such as electronics, aeronautics, defense, food, pharmaceutical, medical devices and motor vehicles would typically benefit by using SYSPRO's Lot Traceability module. It facilitates tracking material movement through the receiving, manufacturing, assembly, inspection, stocking and final dispatch stages. Integration with SYSPRO's other modules permits full upward and downward traceability through all inventory transactions.

Bill of Materials
The accuracy of your bills of material determines the efficiency and accuracy of your manufacturing costing, procurement, shop loading and ultimately, customer service. A bill of material in SYSPRO forms the basis for lead time calculations, material and capacity planning, factory documentation, shop floor control and manufacturing costing. The Bill of Materials module enables you to create and maintain a model of your manufactured or assembled products. You can construct quantity or percentage relationships between assemblies (final product), sub-assemblies (bulk batches) and components (raw materials) using up to 15 levels, and can assign each component (raw material) to a selected operation in the parent routing. You can model the routing (operations or method) of the product to accommodate varying size batches, milestone operations, progressive scrap and dynamic elapsed times. The routing can also include information on tooling, operator skill levels, operation instructions, testing requirements, etc. Full bill of material costing and what-if costing facilities are provided and you can implement product change control if you use the Bill of Materials module in conjunction with SYSPRO's Engineering Change Control module.

Product Configurator
The SYSPRO Product Configurator enables manufacturers to differentiate their product offerings through the ready customization of product to meet customer specifications. The Product Configurator module provides a rules-based configurator that will primarily help companies efficiently process products that are manufactured-to-order, assembled-to-order or sold in many configurations. It can also help reduce configuration errors, while reducing the involvement of experts in routine transactions.

Pre-defined user configurations are set up to control the configuration process and eliminate invalid product options and options relationships. The configuration can be set up to create a stocked parent part, non-stocked parent or both. Once the parent has been defined, non-technical people can use the Product Configuration Wizard to create a viable customized product for a bill of material, job, sales order, estimate, quote or a combination of these. You can also retain libraries of commonly configured items.

In this way you can offer multiple configuration options to customers in a controlled, cost-effective and user-friendly manner in order to maximize customer service and operational efficiency.

Quotations
The Quotations module enables the entry and maintenance of quotations, the printing of free-format quotations and, upon confirmation of the quote by the client, the confirmation of the details into Work in Progress, Sales Orders and Requisitions/Purchase Orders.

The Quotations module generates quotes, which emulate sales orders, with up to five quotation quantities/offers per line. While quotation may be as simple as a listing of stock parts, the power of the module becomes evident when one or more stock items must be specially made. In these cases, a supporting estimate can be created. This, in turn, may have one or more special parts, which again can be supported by an estimate, and so on, similar to a bill of materials. This process can be extended to fourteen levels, which are then rolled-up to complete the quotation's top level costing. Prices are calculated through price mark-ups based on a % of individual Labor/material costs, and/or using a specified Rate indicator for Labor, and/or using an entered price for material. In addition three global markup percentages can be entered all labor, material and the total.

When the quotation is accepted, it can be used to record a sales order and, where necessary, a chain of master and sub-jobs to support it. Purchase requisitions and purchase orders can be created for special bought-out items or when shortages exist for bought-out/sub-contract items anywhere in the Sales Order/Job chain.

Besides using the Quotations module for quoting, SYSPRO has a simplified quoting system that can be used within Sales Order Entry, called Quick Entry. You use the Quick Entry function to enter quotes in a rapid and effective manner without having to enter all the details associated with the entry of a normal order. It is ideally suited to a telesales environment, where speed of entry is important and the facility to enter a quote rather than an order is vital. The quote can be stored for retrieval at a later stage and then converted into an order for a specific customer.

Requirements Planning
The Requirements Planning module is the focus of the manufacturing and material resource planning system. It consists of four sections: Master Production Scheduling facilities, Rough-Cut Capacity and Resource Planning Net Requirements planning facilities for materials together with capacity planning for work centers and labor, Work orders and purchase order action. Features of this module include variable planning horizons, dynamic capacity profiling and load leveling. This is a bucketless system. The calculation is regenerative and infinite. This can be fed into Forward Finite Scheduling.

Blanket Sales Orders and Releases
The SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders and Releases module provides an effective method of setting up, tracking and reconciling Release System contracts and releases between Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) and their customers (particularly the Motoring Industry).

These contracts, which govern blanket orders placed for the supply of material over time with multiple deliveries, have historically been managed manually. This has made it difficult and time consuming to provide an accurate means of tracking cumulative release quantities and converting them into deliveries. The underlying problem for suppliers is that it takes so long to action a new release that management cannot examine the ramifications of any changes. The process is inherently difficult and error-prone, often resulting in the supplier incurring penalties for stopping the OEM's assembly line. The supplier is neither able to check timely that the OEMs are adhering to the contract, nor do they have time to establish their own capability of meeting the new requests. This results in missed delivery dates, emergency purchasing and production control in a permanent state of expediting. The Blanket Sales Orders and Releases module is designed to address these problems.

It enables the easy capture or import of a new release and provides the necessary tools to manipulate the release and advise the customer of what has been accepted or changed and why. It enables updating of existing scheduled orders automatically, and provides an audit trail of deliveries so that disputes over quantities supplied to date can be resolved. It also enables the various tasks to be split up so that the appropriate level of staff can be employed for each function.

Customer Relationship Management
The SYSPRO Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system lets users track and manage all customer and supplier touch points. Customer correspondence, status, vendor relationships, marketing campaigns, service issues, product returns, warranty and repair histories, quote and sales order information are monitored and recorded, providing a 360 degree view of internal or external business relationships. SYSPRO CRM enables sales, marketing and customer support operations to work collaboratively to achieve total customer satisfaction.

SYSPRO CRM enables manufacturers to increase revenues and client satisfaction through optimal client management. In addition it enables the manufacturer to decrease order cycle times and deliver product when required. Real time information in CRM enables you to proactively anticipate your client’s requirements.

Finite Scheduling
SYSPRO provides strong, real-time finite capacity scheduling capability. In order to stay competitive, manufacturers must drive lean operations. The finite capacity capability enables manufacturers to use flexible, short-run, short-horizon scheduling, resulting in cost-effective production runs. Finite Capacity Scheduling creates realistic schedules and promise dates for customers, which increases profits by improving productivity and customer satisfaction, and reducing costs.

The Cell Scheduler feature enables each manufacturing cell to be scheduled independently with user-defined rules for optimizing and viewing work in the cell. Gantt charts show a time-based view of scheduled operations for the machines in each cell. Additional requirements for resources such as operators, setters and tools are shown in parallel with the Gantt chart when calculating the schedule. The Cell Scheduler aims to achieve the optimum utilization of resources (labor, machine and tools) and create achievable work-to lists.

Quality Data Collection
The Quality module integrates the recording of quality parameters with the recording of progress data. The quality data items to be recorded are user-defined. They may be related to a machine, a product or a customer or they could be manually selected. The collected data is stored in a database, which can be queried directly or via an analysis tool. APS provides instant checks for trends and "blips" in the collected data and can be configured to provide warnings when processes reach an out-of-tolerance range.

Work in Progress
The Work in Progress module enables you to accurately control costs of work orders currently in progress. Material usage and labor can be posted in real time and in batch mode. It also enables variance reporting to be produced between estimated costs and actual costs of each job. Work orders may be added for stocked items (with a bill of materials), stocked items without a bill of materials or non-stocked items. These work orders can create a bill of jobs for all relevant sub-assemblies down the BOM chain. Labor transactions can be posted through kit issues, manually or imported into the system from a data collection interface. Material allocations can be issued to a job through kit issues or manually and optionally allow for the substitution of a material allocation when performing kit issues.

Activity Based Costing
The SYSPRO Activity Based Costing (ABC) enables you to more accurately attribute overhead costs to specific products by associating elements of overhead cost to those products actually causing the cost burden and by enabling you to apply these costs at the points of transition in the procurement, manufacturing and sales cycles.

ABC is not another SYSPRO inventory costing method (i.e. Average, Standard, FIFO, LIFO and Last), but rather it provides you with a different method of calculating these costs. The traditional costing method of loading overheads against a product according to the labor content becomes increasingly inaccurate when processing a diverse range of products, particularly where disparate overhead usage is involved., Because these overhead costs often comprise a significant portion of the total cost of a product ABC allows increased accuracy in calculating the cost recovery and thereby improved accuracy in calculating product profitability.

The overhead costs are accumulated against items as they are purchased, manufactured and sold, by attaching elements of cost to each transition point (that is, at the actual point of purchasing, manufacturing, or selling an item). You may configure costs to be fixed per batch, or based on the quantity being handled. You can recover pre-production costs such as buying, expediting and goods-in, as items are received into stock from purchase orders. You can recover manufacturing costs at the time of receipt into stock of goods from Work in Progress. The recovery of these ABC overhead costs may be over-and-above the overheads recovered using traditional methods (that is, labor postings into work in progress). You can recover post-production costs, such as marketing, credit control, inspection, packing and shipping through cost of sales as the final item is invoiced.

Assets Register
The Assets Register module enables companies to better manage and control their asset investment. An audit trail of all transactions is recorded and available for viewing in Asset query, together will all financial information flowing through to General Ledger, optionally defined by Branch, Group and Cost Center . The information contained in Assets Register can be output and/or integrated to the General Ledger or it can be run as a stand-alone module. Asset tracking is enabled through a number of additional fields such as location, responsible user, an asset count and labeling system and asset transfer program. Book and tax valuations, with a standard asset revaluation program are provided, as well as allowing 3 alternate valuations. Extensive security is available against functions and individual fields, to protect against unauthorized changing of financial data.

SYSPRO Reporting Services
SYSPRO Reporting Services is the next generation reporting tool that forms part of the SYSPRO Enterprise Reporting suite. It incorporates an embedded version of Crystal Reports XI to provide a single, cost-effective solution that simplifies operational effectiveness. You would use SYSPRO Reporting Services to design custom reports to virtually any level of complexity, complete with tailored reporting options, preferences and layout features such as graphs. You would also use it to share reports between users and companies, protect access to information and publish reports in multiple formats. SYSPRO Reporting Services enables you to produce professional-looking reports quickly and with minimal cost and effort. It enables you to significantly reduce the costs typically associated with the creation and design of reports as well as increase productivity by allowing for the scheduling of multiple reports that can be run simultaneously in the background. Cost savings are realized through the inclusion of built-in drivers (to bind to optimized SYSPRO e.net solutions business objects); report archiving (reduces the consumption of office stationery); quicker development time (no need for external report designers); and protection from changes in technology upgrades (no more re-engineering of existing reports with each new version). SYSPRO Reporting Services is based on the .NET framework, and has support for Windows and UNIX. Standard SYSPRO e.net solutions Query Business Objects are used to interrogate the information from the SYSPRO database and XML messaging is used to communicate between the client and server of SYSPRO Reporting Services.