With many companies leveraging offshore manufacturing to cut costs, American manufacturers with an onshore manufacturing model have one main goal in mind when it comes to staying competitive, cutting costs. Cutting costs doesn’t mean layoffs, in fact, in the current labor market, many manufacturers are short staffed. Cutting costs means increasing efficiency, doing more with less, improving automation, and finding ways to reduce redundancy and waste.
On this Friday the 13th, we explore 13 wicked awesome and effective ways to future-proof your manufacturing operations with technology. 13-ways to leverage Infor CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine) ERP to cut costs and create a scalable and smart environment that grows with you over the next 10+ years. Whether you are new to CloudSuite Industrial, looking to upgrade to a current version, or looking to enhance your existing system further, here are 13-ways CloudSuite Industrial can transform your operations and save you money:
1. Real-Time Data Access and Decision-Making
“Real-time data” is a buzz word but what does that actually mean for your business? In legacy systems or disparate systems, aggregating your data into a report is incredibly time consuming. Someone on your team is spending hours putting together a report or analysis with information at hand. That information is often outdated, inaccurate, or missing information that could influence decision making. With one consolidated system like Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP that is updated in real-time, you can confidently use your data to make informed decisions about your vendors, customers, shopfloor, supplies, processes, etc. This allows you to identify areas for improvement and quickly address issues as they arise, which improves the accuracy of your quality control processes, forecasting, resource allocation, price adjustments, and ultimately reduces redundancies and downtime.
2. Advanced Supply Chain Visibility
Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP offers a robust supply chain management system that truly streamlines production efficiency across the entire product life cycle. This ERP integrates supply chain management with production scheduling and advanced process intelligence to give manufacturers a full 360° end-to-end view of their operation including 3rd party suppliers, shipping, parts, advanced BOM, labeling, lot control, and visibility into allocated inventory allowing your team to minimize stockouts, avoid overstocking, and easily pull products in the event of a recall or audit.
3. Production Scheduling and Workload Optimization
Your operational and manufacturing efficiency is heavily dependent on the effectiveness of your production scheduling capabilities. Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP offers the latest tools for optimizing production schedules, balancing workloads across various workstations, and ensuring that resources are utilized effectively. Automated scheduling based on historical performance and demand creates and environment where you’re never over staffed, understaffed and ensures seamless adjustments to changes in production or demand constraints reducing idle time and bottlenecks.
4. Improved Demand Forecasting and Planning
Instead of relying on external systems or manual processes or spreadsheets for forecasting and demand planning, Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP provides built-in demand forecasting and planning tools and intelligence to help manufacturers anticipate future demand and production needs with greater accuracy. By analyzing historical data along with market trends, this system will help reduce overproduction or underproduction, optimize raw material procurement, and ensure a more responsive manufacturing environment.
5. Automated Quality Management
Quality management is more than ensuring a quality item. It’s executing checks and reviews in a way that is compliant with your industry regulations and requirements. Maintaining a quality control process that meets the needs of your business can be tedious and high-risk when tracked manually. Especially when new requirements are released, or existing regulations change with new legislation. Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP has built-in features and workflows that provide real-time monitoring throughout the production process. With CloudSuite Industrial you can easily integrate quality checks into each stage of production, detect defects early, minimize rework, reduce waste, and help prevent product recalls. Easily store and retrieve documentation, regulation, and procedures stored directly in the system to ensure compliance with your industry standards.
6. Warehouse Management and Shipping
Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP integrates inventory management, warehouse management, and shipping and fulfilment with SureShip. With CloudSuite Industrial and SureShip, you’ll gain a full end-to-end and highly efficient system that easily tracks the purchasing of raw materials, expiration dates where applicable, cost-of-good calculations, inventory locations, shipped inventory tracking, built-in rate shopping and more. With the click of a button your team is empowered to easily pick, pack, and ship inventory with confidence as well as order inventory and supplies with ease. Complete warehouse and shipping visibility with automated tracking reduces manual errors while maintaining optimal inventory levels. Thus, lowering your holding costs, avoids production delays, and reduces waste.
7. Enhanced Collaboration and Communication
Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP breaks down communication silos, reducing manual efforts, and increasing cross-functional collaboration between teams. By offering a single source of truth across production, supply chain, finance, and sales, CloudSuite Industrial ensures all departments are aligned with operational goals and objectives. A functional and consolidated ERP streamlines communication, reduces delays in decision-making, and ensures smooth hand-offs between teams.
8. Scalable Cloud Infrastructure
One key advantage of Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP is accessibility and security. CloudSuite leverages secure cloud technology to provide easy access to your data across sites, locations, and on-the-go mobile access. With regular updates, CloudSuite eliminates the need for costly upgrades and migrations allowing you to stay current with the latest feature releases. This technology is scalable as you grow and eliminates the need to invest in expensive on-premise hardware. Additionally, modern cloud infrastructure offers improved data security, automatic data backups, threat monitoring, and load balancing to support growth and easy management of remote operations.
9. Sustainability and Resource Planning
Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP can help optimize energy and resource consumption through detailed production monitoring and analytics. By tracking machine performance, output, and energy usage, CloudSuite Industrial can identify inefficiencies and suggest corrective actions, such as equipment maintenance, operational changes, or material recalculations. This not only reduces operating costs but also supports sustainable manufacturing practices and environmental tax incentives.
10. Mobile Accessibility and Real-Time Production Monitoring
Manufacturing environments are increasingly adopting mobile technologies especially those with a field service or maintenance requirement. Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP offers mobile access to inventory, scheduling, customer data, and more allowing supervisors and operators to monitor and manage production processes, job sites, and maintenance from any location. This flexibility improves responsiveness, customer service satisfaction, and allows real-time interventions as needed.
11. Labor Tracking and Workforce Allocation
Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP’s workforce management features enable manufacturers to efficiently optimize labor allocations. CloudSuite Industrial goes beyond standard timecard management and tracks employee productivity, skill levels, availability, and stores documentation, helping managers assign the right resources to the right tasks at the right time. Automated time and attendance tracking also ensures accurate payroll and compliance with labor regulations.
12. Increased Automation and Reduced Manual Processes
One of the biggest challenges with legacy ERP systems is manual processes and bad data. Repetitive and manual tasks can slow down productivity and introduce errors. According to the Data Warehouse Institute, upwards of $600 billion every year can be attributed to data errors in the supply chain, data procurement, and other vital areas, exposing organizations to compliance risks in addition to a large amount of wasted money and resources. Not only does CloudSuite Industrial have validation and checkpoints in place but it also has an audit trail, real-time refresh, and automations to help reduce human errors, speeds up workflows, and free employees to focus on higher-value activities, ultimately improving operational efficiency.
13. Comprehensive Analytics and Reporting Dashboards
Lastly, Infor CloudSuite Industrial ERP offers detailed and comprehensive reporting tools, KPI dashboards, and analytics tools. Easily set your key indicators, build custom reports, and export analytics. Gain access to real-time dashboards that provide insights into valuable performance metrics, financial performance, detailed YOY comparisons, and customer demand, enabling faster and more data-driven decision-making for your business.
What’s Next?
Interested in learning more? As the top Infor CloudSuite Industrial partner in the US, our team confidently knows how to help your business harness the power of a modern, scalable, cloud-based ERP to take your operations to the next level and help you grow your business. We have executed over 400 ERP implementations for American manufacturers and pride ourselves on personalizing the software to meet the unique requirements of your business and your industry.
Contact us today to request a demo, pricing, or manufacturing consultation. We look forward to partnering with you!
