How Advanced Manufacturing ERP Supports Customization and Product Innovation?
In today’s dynamic market, customization and product innovation are no longer luxuries—they’re necessities. Customers demand products tailored to their needs. Businesses that can deliver personalized products gain not just consumer satisfaction but also brand loyalty. At the same time, innovation keeps the brand relevant, grabs attention, and ensures a competitive edge.
Achieving both demands right tool. Here comes the role of Advanced Manufacturing ERP. These smart, and robust systems streamline complex processes, helping organizations to offer personalized products and stay ahead of the curve with innovation.
With evolving manufacturing industries, the importance of customization and innovation continues to grow. Advanced Manufacturing ERPs are fulfilling the goals and giving businesses the competitive edge they need.
In this newsletter, we will explore how Advanced Manufacturing ERP supports crafting of personalized products and foster product innovation, stay tuned.
Table of Contents:
How does Advanced ERP Software Support Customization and innovation?
Modern customers expect products tailored to their specific preferences, making product customization a critical factor for business success. Advanced Manufacturing ERP systems are designed to enable businesses to meet these demands effectively. Here’s how they support product customization:
Bill of Materials (BOM)-
Manufacturing ERPs allow businesses to create flexible BOMs. This can accommodate variations in raw materials, designs, and components based on customer requirements. This ensures seamless production of personalized products by generating material hierarchy without disrupting standard workflows.
For example, in a biscuit manufacturing organization that produces packets of 8, 10, and 15 biscuits, the advanced ERP system helps by enabling flexible Bill of Materials (BOM) management. If a client requests custom packaging, say 10 biscuits per packet, the ERP allows the creation of a specific BOM for that order.
The ERP ensures that the necessary adjustments, like altering the number of biscuits per packet or changing packaging material, are made without disrupting the standard BOM or the daily production workflow.
The system can seamlessly manage these variations in the BOM, ensuring that the required raw materials, packaging sizes, and production processes are automatically adjusted, while continuing the regular production of 8,10 and 15 biscuit packets. This flexibility allows the manufacturer to meet client-specific demands without halting or delaying other production orders.
Dynamic product configurations-
The ERP allows manufacturers to customize changes in shape, size, weight etc. as per the demand. This flexibility helps organizations to fulfil the specific needs of the customers in time.
For example, a chocolate manufacturing company primarily produces chocolates in a standard rectangular shape. With an Advanced ERP system, the company can dynamically configure its production process to create chocolates in custom shapes, such as animals, for a kids' special edition.
The ERP ensures that the necessary adjustments in moulds, materials, and production parameters are seamlessly integrated into the workflow, enabling the manufacturer to meet customer-specific demands promptly without impacting overall efficiency.
Analytics-
Analytics are major key points that manufacturers can use to measure customer choice. By analysing these points, manufacturers identify hotcakes among their products and strategize. Manufacturers can get customized analytics to drill deep down to understand future demands & trends and get a competitive edge in the market by changing production preferences according to the trends.
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Innovation through new product development-
Advanced ERPs offer New Product Development (NPD) capabilities through its dedicated module.
It can help to manage entire lifecycle of a new product- from initial concept to research or designing, prototyping, testing, and production. In context of process manufacturing, the software can gather requirements, conduct R&D, analyse physical/nutritional properties, create lab batches for sample production, perform cost-profit analysis, manage approvals for samples, procure raw materials, and update the formula in main database after approval.
The module gives full control over development by allowing to visualize timeline, resource allocation and progress.
Streamlined product development processes-
ERP software is a central space for an organization to manage everything from R&D to production. Since everything is united, there is a streamline process flow of product development.
For example- a cookie manufacturer can combine research and development, production, and packaging processes. Since all operations are centralized, they make a better system to work for a common goal. This cohesiveness reduces chances of errors and ensures that product development is faster and flawless.
Supplier collaboration-
Innovative or customized products require trusted suppliers to deliver raw materials of desired quality level. ERP software can store pool of verified vendors. It can also store various information of the vendor like lead time, rate, EOQ (Economic Order Quantity), agreements, discounts, certification, etc.
ERP can give history of trades with a vendor, and basis that organization can establish better relationship with it. This relationship can reduce lead time, modify agreements, lower down rates in due course of time and eventually empower R&D team of the organization to experiment and innovate faster.
Enhancing collaboration and communication-
ERP software unites various departments and sends notification to all concerned departments. Therefore, for any production requirement, various departments like inventory, production, procurement, QC and QA, maintenance, Finance, Sales etc. will get alerts.
Hence, there is transparency and proper communication among departments which eventually boosts collaboration.
CRM integration-
ERP facilitates CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration. This provides real time feedback from customers and help organizations to know about consumers’ choices and feedback on the innovation/customization.
Organizations can innovate and do necessary changes as per the feedback in the market and take competitive edge. It even stores a trail of all the conversation with the customers including requirement, cost details, approvals, etc., for future references.
Wrap up:
In the race to meet ever evolving customer demands and overtake competitors, customization and product innovation are the strongest allies of a manufacturing organization. Ignoring any of these could be detrimental.
Advanced Manufacturing ERP system, like BatchMaster ERP, can balance both at ease, streamline processes, and foster creativity. It’s a right time to adopt the advanced technology, it’s time to explore how BatchMaster ERP can transform your business.
Capabilities like New Product Development, Cost Analysis, Formula Version Control and Purging, Material Substitution, Side-by-Side Formula Analysis, Multiple UOM (Unit of Measures) and their conversions, Trend Analysis, and many more make BatchMaster ERP a perfect choice to pick for innovation and customization oriented organizations.
To know more about how it can facilitate business growth and innovation visit BatchMaster or write to us on sales@batchmaster.co.in to know more.