26 Kasım 2012 Pazartesi

ERP SİSTEMİNİN MODÜLLERİ

Üretim Takip Modülü
Üretim planlarının oluşturulması, gerçekleşen üretim verilerinin saklanması ve tüm bu süreçlerdeki faaliyetlerin sürekliliğinin sağlanmasında hızlı, etkin ve otomatik sonuçlar üreten bir modüldür. Özellikle, sisteme anaverilerin girilmesi ve üretim modellerinin işlenmesiyle, geriye sadece gerçekleşen ve planlanan verilerin karşılaştırılması kalmaktadır. ERP sistemi, kendisi programlandığı şekilde, bize istediğimiz verileri istediğimiz arama ve sıralama kriterine göre raporlama imkanı ve avantajı sunmaktadır. Özellikle işlemlerdeki ve hesaplamalardaki olası insan hatalarını ortadan kaldırmaktadır.

Satınalma Modülü
Satınalma ile ilgili tüm veriler, bu modülde tutulur. Satınalma bilgilerinden, satınalma şartnamelerine, ürün özelliklerine, tekliflerden siparişlere, sözleşmelerden uygulamalara ve satınalma tedariklerine kadar tüm faaliyetler, bu modül sayesinde otomatik, hızlı, güvenilir ve kayıp-kaçaklara yol açmadan gerçekleştirilebilmektedir. Aynı zamanda tedarikçilere ait değerlendirmeler, tedarik süreleri ve tedarik zincirindeki unsurlar, bu modül ile takip edilebilmektedir.

Malzeme Yönetimi ModülüÖzellikle BOM (Bills Of Materials) verilerinin oluşturulmasında, satınalma kararlarındaki miktar verilerinin sağlıklı şekilde elde edilmesinde, depolama, envanter kayıtlarının tutulmasında ve takip edilmesinde çok önemli izlenebilirlik avantajları sunmaktadır.
Kalite Kontrol Modülü
Üretilen ürünlerin, belirlenen kalite koşullarının sağlandığının veya sağlanmadığının kontrolü için kalite şartlarının kontrol edildiği, sistemin tüm kontrol kayıtlarını sakladığı ve kalite verileri ile sonuçlarının ürettildiği modüldür. Özellikle bir ürünün üretilmesine yönelik olarak, o ürünün izlenebilirliğinin ve kalite verilerinin, saklanmasında önemli rol oynar. Geriye doğru bilgiye ulaşılmasında çok önemli kolaylıklar ve avantajlar sunar.

Satış ve Dağıtım Yönetimi ModülüÖzellikle satışların gerçekleştirilmesindeki sipariş verilerinin takip edilmesinde, sevkiyat planlamasında, dağıtım kanallarının takip edilmesinde, satışların zamanında, istenilen şekilde gerçekleştirilmesinde, dağıtımı yapılan ürünlerin izlenmesinde ve geriye çağırma faaliyetlerinde çok önemli kazançlar sunmaktadır. Özellikle satışı yapılan ürünün, artık işletmenin malı olmamasına karşın, ürünün izlenebilirliğinin sağlanmasında ve geriye çağırma durumunda tüm satış verilerine otomatik olarak erişebilmede, zaman, kalite ve diğer unsurlar açısından çok önemli katkılar sunmaktadır.

Finans ModülüÖzellikle işletmelerin finansal altyapılarına ait tüm finansal verilerin takip edilmesinde, kayıtların sürekli ve güncel olarak tutulmasında, yatırım kararlarındaki faaliyetlerde, kısa, orta ve uzun vadedeki finansal ihtiyaçlarda, ödeme planlarında çok önemli kazançlar sunmaktadır.

Genel Muhesebe ModülüMuhasebe ile ilgili kayıtların, müşteri veritabanı bilgilerinin, ödeme planlarının, alacakları ve tahsilatların, çeklerin ve diğer genel muhasebe uygulamalarının tamamını kapsamaktadır. Personelin alacakları, bordro işlemleri ve diğer muhasebe kayıtlarının tamamı, bu modül altında saklanmaktadır.

İnsan Kaynakları Modülü
Personelin kariyerine ait, eğitim ihtiyaçlarının belirlenmesinde, eğitim planlarının oluşturulmasında, eğitim kayıtlarının saklanmasında, işe alımlarda kriterlerin belirlenmesinde, işe alım sürecindeki mülakat sonuçlarının ve tüm CV’lerin tutulmasında, etkin olarak kullanılabilen bir modüldür. Özellikle insan kaynaklarının sürekli olarak geliştirilmesinde, yetkinliklerin belirlenmesinde ve tüm bu süreçlerle ilgili verilerin kayıt altında olmasında, son derece önemli kolaylıklar sağlamaktadır.

Bu modüllere ilave olarak; Bütçe, Müşteri ilişkileri (CRM), Teknik Servis ve firmaların temel ihtiyaçlarına özel geliştirilen özel modüllerde bulunmaktadır.

8 Kasım 2012 Perşembe

ERP systems: Drive growth, increase profits


Don’t let your current IT investments hold you back
Many manufacturers' information technology (IT) budgets are skewed toward maintenance and integration activities. This can prevent strategic investment in the systems the company really needs and restricts the organization's ability to grow and remain profitable. It becomes even more confining as the demands of the industry change, requiring new information.
A core problem is that while many IT shops can tell you about the frugality of their budget and targeted project ROI, few can explain IT's impact on productivity or profitability.
What eliminating existing integration and maintenance costs can mean to strategic investment
A litmus test for IT budgets is comparing IT operating expense to IT capital investment. A good rule of thumb suggests numbers should be in the range of 70 percent for operating expenses to 30 percent in capital investment. This tells us that systems are being invested in and renewed and that IT is continually addressing new business problems with technology.
Since the budget tightening that occurred during post 9-11 economy, the numbers have fallen out of balance for too many companies. It's not uncommon to see 80 percent or more of the budget spent on operating expense. The likely culprits: lots of maintenance and enhancement activity keeping old systems alive.
Why poor systems increase SG&A costs and hamper productivity
If you compare the cash outflow of the IT budget to employee productivity you'll find some interesting things.
Is productivity improving or slowly deteriorating over time? Depending upon the level of detail available here, the answer shows up in high indirect to direct employee ratios in manufacturing and often in high SG&A numbers for the overall company. The implication we can draw is that the systems may no longer be helping the firm succeed.
How so? Look for disconnected processes and systems that hamper communication and see if you find lots of workarounds. It's likely these prevent employees from doing the right things—slowing down decisions and customer response times while pushing up overhead—or they are doing the right things, but by spending far too much effort. The cost, ultimately, is profitability.
There are several areas where today's ERP systems can make a substantial difference.
Gain visibility into all aspects of the supply chain
Benchmarking studies have shown that one of the keys to supply chain success is forecast accuracy. A better forecast helps you make better decisions throughout your operations. For example, smoothing production plans uses labor and your manufacturing assets more effectively. And accurate procurement from your suppliers minimizes inventory. More efficient operation leads to more efficient customer response. And it's worth it. Supply chain benchmarking done by AMR Research has shown that improving sales forecast accuracy by as little as 1 percent can improve profitability by 2 percent.
To determine whether an ERP system would optimize your supply chain, assess forecasting and demand management systems. Look at how analytics systems reveal true performance. If there's room for improvement, consider how today's ERP systems provide the capabilities to access information through familiar desktop tools, so that employees can make rapid decisions informed by real-time, accurate data.
Get new products to market faster
New product development and launch is improved when good information and collaboration tools are available. Companies must quickly assess projects, pick the right ones, and manage intellectual property. Collaboration extends beyond coordinating the project and engineers, now it embraces marketing, sales, and all supply chain activity, both internally and externally.
Streamline manufacturing processes
While most manufacturers agree that lean manufacturing improves customer-response time and reduces costs, many organizations run their lean processes with manual systems, spreadsheets, and standalone personal computer applications rather than with enterprise-class applications. The challenge is to make data available to everyone. But this is difficult, laborious, and costly when sharing information with staff, customers, vendors, and partners must be done manually.
Increase collaboration and customer satisfaction
In most industries, supply chain transparency is essential to success. Manufacturers need to be tightly integrated with their suppliers and to provide critical product, price, availability, and shipment information to their customers. This is especially true in a global supply network. Responding to changing demands rapidly requires visibility across the entire supply chain and accurate information about the supplier's capacity.
Yet capabilities, such as inventory visibility, vendor-managed inventories, electronic Kanban replenishment signals, or working with new suppliers, are often done manually or not at all. So, the supply chain is difficult to manage efficiently. To increase efficiency, many companies invest heavily in integrating data from their customers and suppliers into their ERP systems. And they're adding customer portals to reduce order-taking costs, speed fulfillment, and increase customer satisfaction.
Ensure compliance with regulations
There is probably no sector of the manufacturing industry that is not concerned with new regulatory compliances. Simply put, regulatory compliance means collecting critical data and ensuring that production and the resulting products meet the constantly evolving required safety and quality standards. For far too many manufacturers, collecting and compiling this data is an offline task that consumes valuable employee time and reduces profit margins. Compliance can't be ignored, but it can be done more efficiently when data is captured by a current ERP system.
Implement integrated information systems—from making do to moving on
Just because a business doesn't request an integrated system doesn't mean it doesn't need it. People have an amazing ability to accept what they have. When they need data, people go to great lengths to get it—even if it means rekeying data into spreadsheets and other applications. But when they do, it can add to overhead costs and slow down business processes—especially those critical to bringing new products to market or that are customer facing.
Integrated systems can speed time-to-market, improve customer delivery performance, and provide the data executives need to make the right cost and investment decisions as markets and products change.
Succeeding in today's fast-moving manufacturing world requires a combination of exciting new products, collaborative development, partnerships, and acquisitions. Integrated ERP systems have already embedded the best practices for many state-of-the-art global business processes. And, with powerful and familiar desktop tools integrated into the corporate data source, ERP systems give real-time, accurate visibility to the specific information needed to make decisions and move your organization forward.

7 Kasım 2012 Çarşamba

Manufacturers: How ERP systems improve employee productivity


Most manufacturers consider their employees the secret of
their success. In today's cost-competitive world, companies have shifted their emphasis from just adding headcount to get things done to improving employee productivity. Empowering employees by giving them timely information boosts productivity, and this is exactly what an integrated information system—an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—does.
Objective managers recognize wasted labor in their operations—people scrambling to compile information for meetings, time spent sorting out which numbers are the right ones to use, manual processes that slow down production. Ultimately, these can impair customer satisfaction.

Implementing smart business practices, such as delegating decision-making down the ranks of front line employees, can help control wasted labor. But these practices work only when managers provide their people with the right information at the right time so they can manage their responsibilities. This is especially true for employees in customer-facing roles.

Many opportunities for employee productivity increases can be found in areas that aren't part of direct manufacturing or production costs. That may seem counter-intuitive since the justification for many ERP implementations is reducing inventory and headcount. For example, if a company has been running lean anyway—let's say it has an efficient production workforce and carries minimal raw materials and work-in-process inventories—a manager may feel the opportunity for improvement outside those areas is limited. But the truth is that using a state-of-the-art ERP system, such as
Microsoft Dynamics, can help create an environment that boosts indirect labor productivity.

Employee productivity in manufacturing operations
Until recently, a manufacturer could deliver products made entirely within its own walls. Global manufacturing has restructured the industry, taking advantage of low cost labor rates available in emerging countries and specialist firms. Shrinking opportunity windows and aggressive new competitors have forced manufacturers to use design, manufacturing, channel, and distribution partners, creating more complex, networked supply chains that employees must manage expertly. Tightly integrated ERP systems help successfully address these new management challenges.

Manage formulas better
  • New product development and launch. New products are introduced faster and more effectively when employees have good information and collaboration tools. Your company must quickly assess if it's working on the right projects and coordinate projects and engineers. In today's environment, the organization must also manage intellectual property and collaboration, integrating marketing, sales, and all supply chain activity, both internally and externally. The integrated nature of an ERP system makes the sharing and timely delivery of information easier.
  • Building the right product at the right time. Inventory, by its very nature, is wasted investment. It consumes employee time, production capacity, and ties up valuable working capital. ERP tools for demand management, inventory visibility, and integrated scheduling are just some of the ways ERP can help you minimize inventory build-up and ensure more productive manufacturing operations.
  • Making it right the first time. The analytics ERP systems contain can provide good visibility into manufacturing performance and quality, enabling production to stay on track and maintain the highest quality output. Identifying issues early helps ensure efficient use of your production and employee assets.
  • Efficient supplier interactions. Supply chain visibility shrinks the time people spend on busywork and the cost of expediting materials. Electronic kanbans automate communication and eliminate much of the overhead of paperwork and messages. With access to key demand and schedule data, partners can often answer questions themselves, freeing your employees for other tasks.
In addition to helping improve productivity in production operations, ERP systems can help most well-run manufacturing companies realize more of their business potential by equipping them to manage overhead and support operations.

SG&A costs: Labor productivity beyond manufacturing operations
A typical manufacturing company has sales, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs of 13 to 14 percent. Because this overhead cost is a pure expense, any amount that can be eliminated flows directly to the bottom line. For example, a $20 million company with 5 percent EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) profits that reduces its SG&A cost by just one percentage point through improved productivity will show an impressive 20 percent increase in EBITDA.

Here are some likely targets for cutting SG&A costs:
  • Responsive customer service. With information from an ERP system, service representatives can solve customer problems quickly, often on the first call. A collaborative work environment can open up parts of your systems for customers to use directly. Customer self service can yield a huge productivity increase, not only for your employees, but for your customers too.
  • Efficient financial reporting and management. Even something as simple as closing the books faster at the end of the month or quarter can have a profound impact. Integrated information sharing and standardized reporting and analysis can eliminate sneaker nets, which means your people spend less time figuring which set of numbers to use and more time on analysis, decision-making, and planning.
  • IT department productivity. Last but not least, productivity in the information technology (IT) department will likely soar once the maintenance of aging systems is eliminated. Spending less time repairing and integrating older, incomplete systems frees up time for IT staff to concentrate on extending user adoption, utilization, and improving overall benefit from the ERP system.
Customer satisfaction: The goal of increased productivity
Managers in today's manufacturing companies receive tons of data—about equipment, products, orders, deliveries, conditions, quality, and customers. Understanding how managing all that information contributes to increased customer satisfaction and ultimately better top- and bottom-line financial performance is the key to success. That's why so many companies are moving to platforms and systems that help integrate isolated silos of information, provide powerful analytics, and bring the power of the desktop to every management task.

Those companies know that building a fact–based, decision-making organization means putting the insight of your enterprise data into the hands of your staff. Equipped with the data available in ERP systems, and supported by powerful desktop tools, employees throughout the organization can achieve higher productivity and give customers faster, higher quality service.

5 Kasım 2012 Pazartesi

4 ways an integrated ERP system improves supply chain performance


Manufacturers in today's global markets are experiencing dramatically reduced margins coupled with rising customer expectations. Being a successful supply chain partner for your customers demands up-to-the-minute information visibility. You need information on everything from supply chain inventories, to production planning and shop-floor scheduling, to the increasingly robust set of data collected on customer demographics and order preferences. The ability of manufacturers to collect, analyze, and share this information has become a basic operating requirement for global supply chain operations.

An integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can help manufacturers achieve the efficient and effective use of their manufacturing assets and provide customers with the visibility they need. In addition, an ERP system can provide a powerful opportunity for many manufacturers to gain critical insight and competitive advantage by taking them beyond simply managing internal business processes. You can find valuable information at the edge of the company—along those boundaries and interaction points that occur between the manufacturer and its customers and suppliers.

Savvy manufacturers have recognized the benefits of investing in integrated ERP systems, realizing that it enables them to fulfill their mission: to provide a platform that enables effective response to the changing supply chain with reduced long-term information technology (IT) costs.

Here are four ways an integrated ERP system can help improve supply chain performance. After reading this article, contact Pargesoft to learn how an ERP system might work for your organization.

1. Develop better customer insight and interaction
To build long-term relationships with customers today, you need to listen to and understand them. This requires that you maintain a holistic view of those customers. You can obtain such a broad-spectrum view from a variety of data sources, including your supply chain systems; sales and marketing; customer service and field service systems; internal database information; and knowledge gathered from unstructured interaction with customers.

This integrated view—which an ERP system helps provide—can enable manufacturers to look beyond tactical order fulfillment and gain a better understanding of customer wishes for customized products and services—which can help the company differentiate its offerings and increase profits. It can also lead to insight and answers to questions such as: What are the buying patterns? Are we driving larger orders to customers? What does our pipeline look like? Are we seeing demand increases or downturns that we must react to?

2. Achieve global visibility in a demand-driven supply chain
It's critical in an age of tight cost management that manufacturers optimize inventory investment and continue to provide excellent customer service. To do so, manufacturers need to know where inventory is throughout the entire supply chain—which is information an ERP system can help to provide. Knowing when and where inventory is needed enables manufacturers to develop the best plan for production and resupply in critical customer relationships—building only what is required for shipments.

Beyond having the right data for internal operations, manufacturers must also be able to provide customers with visibility into inventory and product availability. In a demand-driven world, real-time intelligence—not nightly batch updates—is required to make timely and effective decisions. This now means systems must be open to the new ways of working—including mobile and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies and support for tracing and other regulatory compliance requirements. The right ERP system can help meet your needs in all these areas.

3. Lean manufacturing, global sourcing, and supplier integration

Managing to the lowest possible manufactured cost is essential. This means applying lean manufacturing practices and connecting to the best suppliers on a global basis.

Today, lean operations are driving an increase in speed and response time for all supply chain participants. Unfortunately for most manufacturers, the new lean business processes are not supported by their legacy systems and must be implemented as manual processes, which can defeat the information visibility crucial to state-of–the-art supply chains.

Locating the best suppliers requires a comprehensive supplier database that enables a manufacturer to recognize where new opportunities for lower costs exist—such as suppliers in emerging countries. This means that manufacturers must have real-time connections to suppliers to respond to changing production demands. Once identified, these new suppliers must be brought on board quickly and cost effectively with the ability to share—and respond to—real-time demand and production data, including new product designs and critical engineering changes. The current generation of integrated ERP systems includes the processes and capabilities to help ensure lean operation, including the need for real-time production data exchange with suppliers.

4. Managing for higher performance
Executives know that measurement and performance are inextricably linked. Whole new metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and benchmarks can give advance warning of problems managers may face in their operations. The real power of these metrics comes when managers can quickly access real-time data that reflects the global domain of their operations. Done well, performance analytics can make manufacturers significantly more agile—an important consideration in today’s very lean supply chains.

However, measuring performance is often far too difficult in the world of disparate legacy systems, the result being that most companies do not currently have a standardized and automated performance analysis capability to manage for higher performance.

Integrated ERP systems today include business analytics that enable executives to standardize metrics across the organization and monitor production and profitability. In fact, ERP systems can provide actionable information to employees at all levels of the organization and make it accessible through their familiar desktop tools, bringing speed and quality to their decision making.

By integrating data, standardizing processes, and opening up visibility to the global supply chain, an integrated ERP system can offer manufacturers a fast path to reduced cost structures, increased speed, and improved transparency that can improve customer satisfaction and company profitability. The bottom line: Today's ERP systems have become an operating platform that can scale and deal with the global competition that is in every manufacturer's future.

BUMERANG