Five key benefits of a purpose-built manufacturing ERP

By Terry Smagh, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan, Infor

Your enterprise is unique. Your ERP software should match

As the manufacturing world rapidly evolves to meet new challenges, many organizations are working to define a new roadmap to success. But time isn’t on the industry’s side. As Deloitte noted in its outlook for 2023, “The manufacturing industry is building back fast, undeterred by significant labor and supply chain challenges. To maintain this momentum, manufacturers should navigate elevated risks while advancing sustainability priorities.”

Early adopters are now more agile, flexible, and efficient—and they could already be making inroads into your share of the market. How can manufacturing organizations, like yours, counteract this risk and quickly drive profitable growth? The answer, for many, lies in technology partnerships.

Partnerships are increasingly important to achieving sustainable business growth, whether that’s accessing data from upstream or downstream partners within your supply chain or turning to technology providers who can bring a wealth of insights about modern cloud capabilities and leading-edge innovations.

Manufacturing is shifting toward industry-specific applications, and these applications are now nearly always delivered in the cloud to maximize adoption, flexibility, visibility, data-driven decision-making, and security, as well as reducing through-life cost.

Benefits of industry-specific manufacturing ERP

Organizations are coming to realize that industry-specific capabilities built into the ERP solution are critical for smooth deployment and headache-free implementation, as well as efficient workflows and reporting. Some key benefits include:

1. Industry-specific cloud ERP offers capabilities that match the way that you do (or should do) business. Proven best-practices are already built-in.
2. You can manage the end-to-end ecosystem with visibility and efficiency, operating in real time to unlock your organization's potential. And because it’s cloud-based, it’s also faster to implement, so you’ll see success more rapidly. Camatic, as an example, quickly stood up a new manufacturing facility in Malaysia—local requirements included.
3. An industry-centric, single view of your business helps you identify variations to expected operational performance early, so exceptions can be analyzed and managed long before your finance teams would typically become aware of them. Your organization can then focus on strategic operational and productivity improvement, fostering a continuous improvement mentality.
4. Gain the necessary level of visibility to quickly respond to customer, supplier, and regulatory needs—minimizing the need for personalizations.
5. Leverage flexible, scalable architecture to be more agile and responsive to fast-changing customer expectations.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to triggering organizational change, the business drivers are often a complex mix of customer expectations and demands for a better buying experience, a focus on operational efficiencies and automation, and the need to meet industry regulations and compliance mandates. That’s why it’s important for your application software technology vendor to offer solutions that are designed specifically for your industry. Manufacturing factories and plants have far different needs than service industries and shouldn’t be expected to force generic applications to meet their unique requirements. As an example, managing the complexity of engineer-to-order or configure-to-order environments demand a single view of the product from concept through quote, build, delivery, and—often—on through to aftermarket service and warranty management. Anything less adds risk to the whole process.

In true partnerships, when everyone understands the distinct needs of your organization and industry, multiple stakeholders come together to create a more powerful outcome. If Infor’s solutions align with your manufacturing needs and you’re ready to get started, or you just want advice on how to modernize your operations, explore Infor’s manufacturing solutions.