Overview
The labor intensive machine tools industry creates parts and products that apply mechanical force to perform work. The assembly operations for these end products are complex, which differentiates this industry from the fabrication industry. Machine tools businesses are engaged in designing, manufacturing and supplying industrial and commercial machinery and equipment. The machinery and equipment industry can be broken down into three industry groups:

• Special purpose machinery (agricultural, construction, and mining)
• Manufacturing (commercial and service)
• General-purpose machinery (ventilation and engines).

As global competition grows fiercer, machine tools manufacturers face three competing challenges in bringing new products to market: decreased margins, increased speed-to-market and complex design processes involving global teams. Machine tools companies need to deliver the right products quickly, but it's not always easy, especially when they are configured or engineered to order. They need visibility into demand and supply as well as precision in order processes.

Machinery industries greatly depend on trade, both as a source of their inputs and as a market for their goods. This means that market fluctuations abroad influence manufacturers to a greater extent than many other industries. The machinery and equipment industry is also a mature one with well established and specialized companies, resulting in few new entrants.  The industry is under pressure to become automated in order to maintain profitability and keep up with the competition. As markets and supply chains grow increasingly global, flexible manufacturing and supply chain planning systems are necessary.

Industry Challenges

• Competition for lower prices
• Continuing to be innovative, especially in the special purpose machinery sector as quality is more important than price
• Waste regulations
• Becoming more technologically advanced in terms of management of production
• Safety
• Lean manufacturing
• Trade dependent
• Shrinking product lifecycles.
• Complex supply networks.

 
How SYSPRO Can Help

Customer Service Management
The SYSPRO CRM suite of applications will enable manufacturers to increase revenues and client satisfaction through optimal client management. Tightly integrated to the SYSPRO distribution and manufacturing suites, the CRM module will enable the manufacturer to decrease order cycle times and deliver product when required. Real time information in CRM enables users to proactively anticipate the requirements of the client.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling
The SYSPRO APS system provides a graphical view of the shop floor in real-time and measures productivity at the closest point to manufacture. It provides a simple and efficient means of coordinating the supply chain through better advanced planning, scheduling and visibility over production. A concise, tactical overview of production schedules and workloads by work center, day and job enables managers to more easily identify potential problem areas and schedule jobs in accordance with available resources and promised delivery dates.

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. Companies in industries such as electronics, aeronautics, defense, food, pharmaceutical, motor vehicles and building would typically require the Lot Traceability module. This module records material movement through the receiving, manufacturing, assembly, inspection, stocking and final dispatch stages. The integration with SYSPRO's other modules permits full upward and downward traceability through all inventory transactions. The module traces product life cycle from raw materials to final products.

Requirements Planning
The Requirements Planning module is the focus of the manufacturing and material resource planning system. The objective of requirements planning is to create realistic purchasing and production schedules, optimize stock holdings and identify capacity constraints in a multi-site, multi-warehouse environment. The module assists with the planning of materials and production capacity required to meet demand and identifies levels of usage of critical resources for rough-cut capacity planning.  It allows for the easy creation of build schedules from Master Production Schedule (MPS) suggestions and the shop floor, and it suggests purchasing, production and transfer schedules to satisfy demand. 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, and can be fed into Forward Finite Scheduling.

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.

Bill of Materials
A bill of material (BOM) is a listing of all the sub-assemblies, intermediate parts, and raw materials that go into a parent assembly showing the quantity of each (including scrap) required to make a parent assembly. It is used in conjunction with Requirements Planning to determine the items for which purchase requisitions and production orders must be released. A bill of material may also be called the ‘formula’ or ‘recipe’. A routing is a set of information detailing the method of manufacture of a particular item. It includes the operations to be performed, their sequence, the various work centers to be involved, and the standards for set-up and run time. The routing can also include information on tooling, operator skill levels, operation instructions, testing requirements, etc. Synonyms for routings are bill of operations, instruction sheet, manufacturing data sheet, operation chart, operation list, operation sheet, routing sheet. Bill of materials has a wide variety of uses for a manufacturing company.

Work in Progress Inspection
Manufacturing Inspection allowing for inspecting, rework, scrap or receiving in as an alternate lower grade product or into a "seconds" warehouse.