What is the minimum ERP modular systems for a Contract Manufacturing Solution which helps you manage manufacturing and a broad range of other business areas, minimizing the need for multiple systems?
The solution must have broad functionality that supports build-to-order, engineer-to-order, and build-to-forecast supply chain models, across both discrete and batch-process manufacturing modes and is particularly well-suited to manufacturers operating in a mixed-mode environment.

Full-scope solutions include management of manufacturing, financial, customer relationship, supply chain, warehouse, human resources, projects, business intelligence, and quality control.
Turn Changing Customer Needs into New Revenue Opportunities:
The best Contract Manufacturing ERP solution delivers adaptability needed to take advantage of new revenue opportunities.  Provide better customer service. Quality-of-service will make customers want to do business with you again and again. When customers know that you can answer any question about an order at any given time, they won’t look elsewhere.
Respond Quickly to Customer Changes and Questions:
Being able to respond quickly to customer changes and questions gives you a competitive advantage. Order promising gives you the ability to promise your customers a reliable delivery date immediately, on request. With the Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution, rush orders can be planned immediately from the sales order. Orders can be modified at any point in the production cycle. Multilevel production orders improve coordination of made-to-order requests and simplify the implementation of make-or-buy decisions.  Multidimensional tracking allows you to respond instantly to customer inquiries about the order status. Access tracking to the dispatch list allows the shop floor manager to determine which customers would be affected if you moved a job.
Improve Your Business Performance:
The Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution helps you run your business more efficiently, so you improve business performance from the shop floor to the bottom line.
Change Manufacturing Methods and Processes Instantly: 
The Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution allows you to instantly change your manufacturing methods and processes, helping you to keep up with changing customer needs. You can modify components and operations on the fly, even on released production orders.
When a change occurs, you can update and re-plan all materials, costs, and operations simultaneously, without time-consuming batch jobs. Multiple planning options, tracking, and action messaging allow you to quickly and easily make exceptions and last-minute changes to give customers what they want when they want it. You can plan from the sales order, the production order, the purchase requisition, or by traditional MPS/MRP planning methods. Furthermore, purchase planners can easily recognize how to adjust supplier delivery schedules to take advantage of new revenue opportunities.
Change Business Processes Easily: 
With the Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution, you can readily change your business processes to accommodate changing workload and customer requirements. You can implement realistic plans according to your capacity demands, and you can redefine:
• Order modifiers and reorder policies as needed
• Capacity and calendars to optimize shop load
• Manufacturing policy options to adapt quickly to new projects
Implement the Most Efficient Processes Immediately: 
When a customer’s needs change, you can easily incorporate the changes made on the shop floor to optimize the current workload. For example, parallel routing enables you to create critical operational paths for make-to-order and project manufacturing.
Design Efficient Manufacturing Processes: 
The Manufacturing ERP Solution provides powerful planning tools that give you the freedom to choose the optimum manufacturing process for ultimate profitability.
For example, when planning production orders, you can plan product family orders that share the same routing. This allows you to make more efficient build schedules. To help you better meet customer demand, the Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution supports efficient collaboration with long-term partners through the use of blanket orders.
Speed Up Orders: 
The Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution speeds up orders by providing visibility into all aspects of your manufacturing processes. You can improve efficiency and reduce lead-time by:
• Redefining setup and queue times on the fly
• Redefining capacity on the fly
• Using the send-ahead function to control material flow to the next operation
Gain Greater Visibility of Your Business Processes: 
The Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution helps you quickly identify processes that could be changed to operate more efficiently and profitably. For example, shop floor operations are readily visible to management so you can easily design new processes to produce a positive impact on the bottom line. In addition, you can respond immediately to emergencies because they are easy to spot, track and act upon.
You can also plan from the sales order. This gives you the flexibility to define the product order structure, making it easier to track the status of multi-line and/or multilevel orders. Inefficiencies are easy to spot because you can monitor shop floor progress job-by-job. You can also make better pricing decisions because costs, materials, and operations are simultaneously re-planned to reflect shop floor changes. You can switch instantly between manufacturing policies to optimize your business and plan additional critical paths, on the fly, to improve delivery.
Implement without Disruption: 
You get immediate value from your investment because the Manufacturing ERP Solution can be implemented with little disruption to your current manufacturing processes. You can start with a basic implementation and benefit immediately. Then, you can add value with phased software implementation-expanding functionality as your business needs require.
Training time is reduced because you can retrain with a phased implementation. Flexible planning options let you manually plan production orders, or plan them from sales orders while implementing MRP functionality. While you implement capacity requirements planning (CRP) and routings, you can calculate and plan production times based on lead times on the item card.
The Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution is designed for maximum operational and setup flexibility, so that implementation time is reduced to a minimum. You can fine-tune the system while it is working and easily implement changes as your operations demand. Furthermore, you don’t need to forecast all manufacturing scenarios during setup – you can respond on the fly.
Effective Management of your Warehouse and Manufacturing: 
Another application area of the Contract Manufacturing ERP Solution is Warehousing, which enables you to increase the efficiency of your warehouse. Warehousing works hand in hand with your Manufacturing ERP Solution. Warehousing functionality enables you to speed up the order handling process to increase customer service and reduce warehouse costs and errors. It provides accurate and transparent inventory data to allow you to streamline your warehouse operations.
Supply Chain Coalition consultation assists corporate fully integrated ERP business software suites that provide complete control over the planning and management of all facets of your business including accounting, manufacturing, and distribution.

CADTalk is an ERP-to-CAD Integration Solution working with SolidWorks, AutoCad, Inventor, and SolidEdge. CADTalk offers real-time integration between CAD Software and SYSPRO ERP allowing perfect synchronization of both data sets and completely eliminating redundant data entry.

Unique in it’s solution; CADTalk is a complete integration of ERP and virtually any CAD software, not relying on batch xml or other export files. All fields are fully mapped to ensure perfect data integrity with on-screen validation.
CADTalk works with multiple levels of BOMs simultaneously in a fully indented BOM view allowing adding/updating of Routes, Structures, and Stock Codes at any level. CADTalk can also be used to directly update Routes, Structures and Stock Code data currently within ERP.
​CADTalk can be an embedded application within your CAD Software or a standalone Viewer; this gives companies robust possibilities depending on their internal engineering processes.
Key Features:

1. Fully integrated real-time solution
2. Manage multiple levels of BOMs simultaneously
3. Map any CAD file property to ERP field
4. Create and update items, routings and structures within ERP
5. Drag/drop and quick data entry all with graphical interface
6. View model and drawings from within the application
7. Import and merge from CAD and/or from ERP data

The Value of CADTalk: 

1. Map any CAD file property to ERP field
2. CAD files can be viewed directly inside the interface
3. ERP data validation to ensure accurate data integrity
4. Intuitive indented BOM view; edit and create at any level and use simple drag and drop
5. Utility template codes for quick new item creation using existing data within ERP
6. Create routes and structures from templates or manually on the fly
7. CAD Files can be dragged directly from the File System into the Assembly Tree, allowing the user to combine BOMs from multiple CAD systems
8. Import/export live data to and from ERP– no file export and uploads required

CADTalk is an ERP—to-CAD Integration Solution working with SolidWorks, AutoCad, Autodesk Inventor, and SolidEdge.  CADTalk offers real-time integration between CAD Software and ERP allowing perfect synchronization of both data sets and completely eliminating redundant data entry.
Unique in it’s solution; CADTalk is a complete integration of ERP and virtually any CAD software, not relying on batch xml or other export files. All fields are fully mapped to ensure perfect data integrity with on-screen validation.
CADTalk works with multiple levels of BOMs simultaneously in a fully indented BOM view allowing adding/updating of Routes, Structures, and Stock Codes at any level. CADTalk can also be used to directly update Routes, Structures and Stock Code data currently within ERP.
CADTalk can be an embedded application within your CAD Software or a standalone Viewer; this gives companies robust possibilities depending on their internal engineering processes.

Knowing where you are, with trust in your enterprise tool-set, helps define where to start. For the best possible outcomes, do your internal systems align - people, technologies, and enterprise software?

Understanding Enterprise Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Integration
Integrating EDI into the enterprise offers significant benefits from small to large businesses.

​The Current EDI Environment
The goal of modern enterprise is end-to-end business integration. Because of the increasing importance of electronic commerce and EDI as core competencies in businesses today, integration of EDI information across an enterprise is extremely important. Integration of EDI data means that manual processes can be automated; turn rates increased and resources used most effectively.
Successfully integrating EDI data however can be difficult. Generally EDI is processed in batches using a broad range of formats, standards and modes of transportation requiring dedicated applications for processing. If not done properly, these specialized applications can actually become barriers instead of enablers.
The key to maximizing the value of the data processed through EDI is to be able to transform it into the formats needed by the various enterprise applications.
EDI in the Enterprise
For more than 25 years EDI has powered e-business and more than 80% of the B2B transmission of information uses EDI. It is used across virtually all industries, including manufacturing, retail, healthcare, education and government agencies. Often referred to as a paperless technology. Using EDI, which is the electronic exchange of standardized business documents, can save more than $1,000,000 per year. EDI Integration can be a simple communications network that links the computer systems of various trading partners. Ideally this is accomplished with a minimum of human involvement, minimizing the associated error and cost. EDI is considered an investment in future savings and transaction process standardization.
The EDI Business Environment
EDI was developed to address inherent problems with paper-based methods of exchanging information.
Some of the obvious problems:

• Process Inefficiencies
• Labor Intensive
• Not easily tracked
• No visibility into the process
• Data entry (often redundant)
• High error rate

EDI, properly implemented, addresses these problems. EDI technology can standardize the various document formats, allowing businesses to share content with the various back end business applications that support the enterprise. Enterprises of all sizes see efficiencies not only in reduced time in manually handling and entering the information, but also in improved accuracy and reduced re-work of exceptions. In addition, EDI technology is purposefully designed to insulate the user from the huge number of EDI formats and standards that exist. EDI technology standardizes the internal formats from the external EDI standard formats used for document exchange.
New Business Drivers:

• Virtual Enterprise

The Internet has radically altered traditional business models. The Internet provides a model that integrates trading partners into a single value chain. While this model depends heavily on the Internet, it enables the coordination of trading partners into a virtual enterprise, where the combined enterprises operate as a coordinated entity.

• Virtual Market Place

Virtual marketplaces are formed electronically, utilizing WEB technology. Buyers and sellers come together in a paperless environment. There are no paper based contracts, price sheets or schedules. This virtual marketplace increases an enterprise’s need for information beyond what traditional enterprise business systems can easily provide.

• Internet versus VANs

The Internet is driving major changes in how enterprises approach B2B (business to business). It is seen as a less expensive, more robust solution than traditional VANs. Couple that with its speed and flexibility and it is easy to see that the Internet will soon replace traditional VANs (Value Added Network) as the primary EDI transport vehicle.

• The Result

The technology facilitating EDI has often been viewed as a separate part of an enterprise’s IT organization and hasn’t really been integrated into the overall architecture. In the past the integration often required complicated and costly custom coding.
EDI users cannot fully realize benefits of the Internet in eCommerce applications until business processes supporting EDI are optimized. This means automating and optimizing end-to-end process flows of EDI throughout the enterprise.
SYSPRO EDI translation software has been deployed at thousands of customers and is managing millions of EDI transactions dollars  every day. 
Summary:
ERP and EDI are part of a larger system of enterprise technologies, process management, lean initiatives and profit center management. For businesses of every type, ERP is key to  successful sustainability. With an ever increasing playing field, software and operations technologies are comingling forming the integrated enterprise. Purchase, lease, renting, pay-as-you-go, hosted or on premise are a few of the options offered to help your business benefit from the unrestrained management tools within ERP. Getting started, from the beginning, with the best ERP software is our wish for every business in every industry.

It's been proven that a properly slotted warehouse drives down operation costs, improves distribution productivity by 8% to 15%, and can yield up to 30% space savings.  Understanding the issues and opportunities with a hits and movement analysis is possible by mapping it out or following pickers. Even so, it's easy to overlook the genuine value of slotting and underestimate its impact on productivity.
What is Slotting:
Slotting (profiling) is the strategic grouping and location assignment of items to optimize the total distribution operation balancing:

• Putaway
• Picking
• Replenishment
• Shipping
• Customer service commitment

Slotting assigns each item to a discrete location based on balancing these conflicting goals
Why Does It Matter?
Poor slotting is an operation's “silent killer” and impacts your entire picking operation.

• Productivity
• Quality
• Throughput
• Customer Service

Optimized warehouse slotting can improve:

• Picking productivity 10% to 15%
• Replenishment 5% to 15%
• Space utilization 5% to 30%

Optimized warehouse slotting can reduce:

• Order cycle time by up to 50%
• Damages 8% to 15%

… all of which impact customer service.
Here are questions to help you identify trends and determine if your warehouse requires a re-slot:

• Plans to build a new warehouse?
• Are there plans to expand the warehouse?
• Are there plans to retrofit your current warehouse?
• Is warehouse space over capacity and unable to store products properly?
• Has your inventory profile changed since your facility was designed?
• Do you now have underutilized capacity, or are you experiencing a space crunch?
• Are storage systems insufficient to meet inventory needs?
• Do you see excessive travel time or observe backtracking in your warehouse?
• Do pickers frequently travel into and out of other zones or aisles?
• Do “bottlenecks” exist in your pick paths?
• Are pickers choosing their routes to pick items and believe they “know better”?
• Have you experienced a spike in missed shipping times?
• Have you observed an increase in order cycle times?
• Do your pick rates fall below industry standards?
• Does your warehouse have racks that collapse and damage products?
• Have you seen a spike in produce damage?
• Have you seen a pattern of certain types of items being damaged?
• Are you interested in optimizing your picking and putaway strategies?

If you answer the questions with a “yes”, you are already considering slotting your warehouse. 
That being the case, here are additional tips to keep in mind as you make your plan: 

1. Don’t expect to hit the ground running using slotting software as an easy fix.
2. Putting too much faith in the existing SKU data will lead to disappointment.
3. Keep an open mind to exploring new rack concepts.
4. This is not a good time to make rules too restrictive.
5. Limit the number of slotting iterations run with the software.
6. Software is not perfect and will not slot every item. Be ready to have manual intervention. Typically, you can expect to manually slot 2% of SKUs.

As you consider your particular operation, here are a few additional thoughts:

• Slotting software can be more beneficial when working in a complex environment.
• It's a good idea to spend time up-front auditing and “scrub” SKU data.
• Minimize the number of storage configurations – keep it simple.
• Be sure to understand data needs and constraints.

Summary:
It’s Time to Reslot If You See:

• Increased replenishments
• Increased pick travel
• Deviations from routes
• Increased order cycle times
• Increased damages
• Increased late shipments
• Changing sales patterns
• Changing sales channels
• Changing inventory patterns
• Seasonal patterns

We have a solution
Most ERP software systems were not designed to deal with the complexities of the warehouse and supply chain.
Our WMS software system provides the functionality to support warehouse management within your existing ERP framework. WMS software will meet the challenges of your simple to complex warehouse management needs while preserving your existing financial investment in business software. 

Reasons to adopt Slotting for your warehouse
Ease of use, ease of picking, ease of packing, ease of sorting, ease of labeling, and time-savings are cost-saving, ROI building, and TCO reducers. i.e., justification for rearranging your inventory regularly based on what is moving and what is not. A high percentage can reduce Cost-per-package if you accept the “SYSTEM’s” control.
Inventory Slotting Scenario
In most warehouses or distribution centers, warehouse management personnel spend significant amounts of time each day traveling back and forth across the floor, unloading, stocking, and picking. Reducing this travel time can increase pick productivity, faster shipping times, and significant labor cost savings for the company.
Inventory slotting is a crucial strategy for reducing travel time on the warehouse floor. Slotting, within warehouse management processes, analyzes inventory movements and purposefully reassigns the bin-position of inventory for greater movement efficiencies. Most ERP systems allow for a discovery report (Inventory Exception) revealing what moves and does not. Most ERPs do not take it to the next level of suggesting “rearrangements,” enabling faster shipment and picking times, which lower the cost-per-box.
Using inventory slotting processes enables warehouse managers to view inventory movement and sales history to see what’s hot and what’s not in warehouses, bins, lots, and serial numbers. Inventory slotting is based on various criteria, such as placing inventory in the best location to enhance customer delivery performance and reduce costs.
Inventory Slotting mechanisms should be developed against warehouse managers, and employees need to know more about inventory to get the tempo of product movements for better forecasting, planning, and improved customer service.
Inventory Slotting helps identify what’s happening in the warehouse with the suggested inventory assignment so warehouse workers travel the least possible distance to pick orders.
What is the bottom-line goal? - Paying for warehouse crews to pick more orders in less time.
How It Works
The first step when slotting a warehouse or distribution center is to look at the physical space and determine what area should hold the hottest inventory – those items that are the fast movers. Bins and shelves in this area could be identified and labeled as the “Hot-Zone.”
The next step is to determine which items and quantities (capacity or min/max) are held in the new Red Zone (BIN) based on the size of the zone and dimensions of the item. For example, the materials manager may determine that the Hot-Zone can hold the top 50-100 fastest moving parts. By using product movement analysis, materials managers identify items in the Hot-Zone. A study using historical sales data presents suggestions for bin/warehouse reassignments. The same steps are repeated to identify zones outside the red zone, including the items they should contain.
Ranking your items by movement volumes between fast and slow movers allows optimization based on correct current and historical data. These product-specific rating opportunities enable managing stock locations for optimal picking and delivery of orders, allowing cost savings while improving customer delivery demands.
The analysis results should allow for the development of slotting movement tasks to take advantage of these re-positioning benefits. For example, Suggest warehouse transfers from the current bin/location to the target bin/location for all stock codes within the selection criterion range.
Inventory Warehouse Allocation is based on Activity Exception (Slotting), and while complicated, executing slotting is a simple series of relocation movements. Which results in productivity increases, allowing faster shipping times and enhanced customer service, positively impacting your bottom line?
Warehouse Slotting is Critical in Improving Efficiency and Reducing Costs. 
We recommend WMS, which contains a robust warehouse slotting software tool that optimizes product placement in warehouses and distribution centers to improve operational productivity, safety, and space utilization significantly.