Lean thoughts spreading beyond production

‘Guided-selling’ systems, ‘capable to promise’ (CTP), particularly for selling capacity, business ‘dashboards’, e-business and web portals are the most requested add-ons for ERP in the engineer- and configure-to-order industries. That’s the work on the street, according to Lee Blandford, pre-sales consultant with specialist ERP system vendor Cincom. “Manufacturers have had a good go at their production shop floors, but they haven’t taken the Lean Thinking messages into the rest of their organisations,” he says. Now they’re starting to take that more seriously. Looking at guided-selling, he means more than product configuration, although that’s part of it. “What’s required is ‘an expert sitting on the shoulder’ of the salesman or customer, helping them not just to get to a valid assembly and a price, but which product type is suitable for their application,” he says. And the benefits: customer self-service means order entry at zero sales engineering cost and happy customers; thus also competitive advantage; and reduced, error-free admin and eased internal processes, with quotations and correctly configured product going straight through to production. As for selling capacity, it’s simply about providing an automated mechanism for identifying and then selling specific spare capacity, recognising the fact that in most operations, while many of the routes and resources can produce many of the products, none can produce all of them, so there’s bound to be an optimum that still leaves unused capacity. Revealing that information enables instant ‘capable to promise’. Then on the B2B and portals side, Blandford makes the point that today it’s about getting the website to do the ‘integration’ and to automate the flow and transformation of information and transactions to and from the user’s and customers’ ERP systems so that they function seamlessly, responding to requests and generating purchase orders and the rest. Cincom is now partnering with demand management software firm Finmatica to offer more supply chain functionality for companies involved with complex manufacturing. The two will co-develop and co-sell their respective Control ERP and FineChain supply chain solutions. Control already has demand management, master scheduling and capacity planning, but Finmatica will provide more in-depth advanced planning and scheduling for detailed, short-term operational scheduling, medium-term collaborative manufacturing planning and complex project planning. The solution utilises portal technology to enable customers, partners and suppliers to get online visibility of order and production status, from material requirements to final shipments.