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Tag: ERP

Supply Chain Management

Maximise Transparency across your Supply Chain

Written by Pimbrook Software on .

Although the current economic environment in Ireland is slowly gaining ground according to experts, businesses throughout the nation are still working to develop new methods and internal procedures that will stimulate their financial gains and produce long-term benefits.

Conventional methods used for batch tracking and traceability help identify problems from the point of sale, working backward. But, that does little for anticipating or eliminating the complications before they occur.

Fortunately, new tracing capabilities are transforming internal procedures and maximising the transparency of the supply chain by allowing organisations to embed every detail of the product’s life cycle into each specific item record. This advanced type of provenance and traceability data can then be utilised to analyse quality controls, safety, and reliability with heightened accuracy. Moreover, it helps to maximise your company resources, whilst simultaneously strengthening your supply chain performances.

However, before you can introduce new technology tools, there are a few things to consider. These steps can help you develop the foundational groundwork required within your company dynamics, so that your enterprise resource planning system will achieve its maximum potential.

  • Initiate a Strategic Planning Process

Without clearly defined goals and a system for achieving them, improving transparency along your supply chain will remain in the realm of the subjective. Although you could hire expensive consultants to review your current management procedures, examine your floor layout, and create costly, and complicated overhauls, for most production and distribution model businesses, third-party consultation simply isn’t necessary.

Initiating a strategic planning process simply requires opening the channels of communication between your staff members and fostering an environment that rewards innovation. Logically speaking, who knows better what is working and what isn’t in your company than your employees who deal with the situations every day?

Creating an atmosphere that welcomes employee suggestions and seriously considers them helps establish a sense of unified purpose that will engender positive innovation.

  • Eliminate Communication Barriers Between Departments

Maximising transparency requires a free flow of communication and information within your organisation. Data flow charts can help you visualise obstructions, but the most important point to remember is to foster sharing among your departments. For instance, placing importance on regular, consistent counts, which get transferred to specific sales members; allocating specific single user subscriptions that designate task ownership for heightened accountability.

This type of departmental communication helps improve transparency across your supply chain, because essentially, every process involved, from the point of sale to replenishment, impacts your company’s performances.

  • Integrate Data into a Comprehensive System

The biggest limitation to supply chain transparency is working with a myriad of separate planning, scheduling, customer, vendor, and accounting software programmes. It’s almost impossible to create the supply chain visibility you need to successfully compete in today’s global marketplace without total data integration.

However, there are many affordable systems available that offer the framework for data integration across business channels, and include sophisticated procurement, inventory, and distribution management such as:

  • Real-time employee access to purchase requisitions and orders
  • Enforcement of purchase order approval protocols—eliminating quality control problems from substitutions or inferior product replenishment
  • Comprehensive inventory costing methods for improved analytics
  • Packaged shipping integration with each point of sale

Improving your supply chain transparency with a comprehensive system offers long term benefits. With the ability to benchmark and establish standardised methods for sharing data, it helps to promote a better employee understanding of the needs and challenges your company faces. Moreover, data integration delivers prescriptive and predictive analytics across the entire length of the supply chain for enhanced decision-making.

Contact us today to see how Sage 200 can help YOUR business

warehouse solution

Implementation tips for developing Sustainable Warehouse Solutions

Written by Pimbrook Software on .

Developing Warehouse Solutions

Warehouse Solution, whether you operate discrete or process manufacturing, perform distribution services, or stock goods for retail, developing sustainable warehouse solutions is essential for achieving long-term success.

The conscientious decision to focus on what is commonly known as the triple bottom line—economic, environmental, and social dimensions—involved in operation is a comprehensive business philosophy. And with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in place, enacting sustainability measures becomes much easier.

What is sustainable warehouse management?

warehouse solution
Essentially, sustainable warehouse management is a system designed to meet the present needs of society without compromising the opportunities and resources available for future generations.

Although it involves the entire scope of the business process, sustainability is closely associated with environmentally sound procedures. Indeed, Global Reporting Initiative’s G4 guidelines cover this aspect, but most recently, they’ve released a linkage document that will assist the compliance of the latest EU directive for the disclosure of non-financial and diversity information.

Warehouse ERP Implementation

Introducing and developing sustainable warehouse solutions is often a challenge, even with an advanced ERP system. Many distributors employ third-party supplier’s (VMI) and logistics (professional carriers) to orchestrate the chain of supply.

However, even these challenges can be reduced with the following implementation tips and techniques. First, divide your sustainability analyses by aspect and type, and then update your core performance indicators within the system with appropriate coding so that the qualitative and quantitative data can be collected and reported properly.

Ignoring the economic performance and market presence aspects, the following list can help you implement the metrics and indicators used to evaluate company sustainability.

Environmental

  • Materials—a percentage of the input usage of recycled materials
  • Energy—energy consumption of the primary source (direct)
  • Water—total usage amount for the facility
  • Emissions, effluents, and wastes—direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by weight, oxide emissions by type and weight, and amounts of non-recyclable solid waste

Labour Practises (Social)

  • Employment—employee counts and turnover rates by age group, gender, and region
  • Health and Safety—Injury occurrence rates, work-related fatalities, occupation-related disease, lost days, and absenteeism
  • Diversity and Equal Opportunity—Basic salary allocation by gender and employee category. (Also see the recent G4 linkage document for simplified EU compliance.)

Human Rights (Social)

  • Investment and Procurement—total numbers and percentages of agreements that have gone through human rights screening
  • Child Labour—any measures that have been taken to help eliminate child labour
  • Freedom of Association—measures that support the right to exercise freedom of association and collective bargaining, and any identification of these rights at risk.

Society (Social)

  • Community—the nature and scope of any programmes, practises, or initiatives that have a positive impact on the operation of your community, and the effectiveness and outcomes of those endeavours.
  • Corruption—the amount and percentage of business units that have been examined for risks related to corruption
  • Consumer Health and Safety—this will naturally vary depending on the type of products housed in your facility, but basically, any assessments made concerning the improvement or life cycles of the products that could impact consumers.

With an advanced ERP system, many of these indicators are already integrated, and the reporting framework can be easily customised to include new governmental regulations and directives.

Effective ERP implementation for a sustainable warehouse involves collecting the right data and then making informed business decisions based on the performance reports that your ERP system generates.