Business Needs

	Accomodate Variable End-Products Which Result From Regrading and Unpredictable Chemical Processes
	Compiling, Storing and Retrieving Certificates of Conformance
	Control, Manage and Conform with Legislative and Environmental Requirements of Hazardous Material
	Ensure Quality of Raw Materials and Monitoring During the Production Process
	Identify and Respond to Seasonal Demand Patterns
	Manage By-Products
	Manage Complex Production Recipes
	Manage Large and Diverse Inventories
	Manage Product and Raw Material Traceability
	Manage Customer Relationships and Service

Key Features and Functions

	Archiving	Distribution requirements planning
	Backflushing	Forecasting
	Bill of materials	Multiple warehouses
	Blanket purchase orders	Purchase order inspection
	By-Products	Where used
	Co-Products	Work in progress inspection
	Dangerous goods text

Accomodate Variable End-Products  Which Result from Re-Grading and Unpredictable Chemical Processes

Using SYSPRO's co-products and manufacturing inspection functionality, you can easily cost and capture the receipt of multiple products of varying grades from jobs originally planned for single-grade items.

You can choose to apportion costs between components and co-products according to a percentage breakdown for the entire material, operation and subcontract costs, or you can define percentages against specific operations and materials.

SYSPRO's Work in Progress inspection system gives you the tools to record the inspection details of manufactured items and, depending on the results, select to receipt, scrap or rework quantities. Units in inspection are visible, but unavailable for use until accepted into stock. Within the inspection function, you can capture detailed records of counts, inspection, scrap, rework and stock receipts. 

You can receipt inspection items as the original product to manufacture on the job, or as a different product or products, which is useful for end products of variable grade. Also, you can receipt items into a warehouse different than what was originally planned.

Compiling, Storing and Retrieving Certificates of Conformance

For a purchased item, you can link an electronic copy of the supplier's certificate of conformance to the relevant lot numbers (batches) for the item, using SYSPRO's multimedia capabilities. You can then view the certificate against a lot when querying the lot and processing transactions, such as job issues, sales or transfers.

Control, Manage and Conform with Legislative and Environmental Requirements of Hazardous Material

SYSPRO provides a number of features to assist you in the control and management of hazardous and dangerous goods with regards to storage, packing and transportation. 

SYSPRO's multimedia features enable you, per stock code, to link and display graphical, video and text information, such as material safety data sheets, dangerous goods safety marks, and safety gear icons. Operators then have access to view and print the information when required.

In addition, the system's flexible custom form functionality enables you to capture dangerous and hazardous goods information per stock code. For example, you can create mandatory or optional custom forms to capture data such as hazard identification number, class, subsidiary risk, compatibility group,   packing group, shipping name and register reference. You can easily configure SYSPRO to display and highlight custom form data on operator entry and query screens; and to print on reports (e.g. picking lists) and on stationery (e.g. job documentation, invoices and delivery notes).

SYSPRO also provides an extensive notes facility, the content of which you can configure to automatically print on certain documentation within the system. Notes include generic notes against all key fields, as well as special key field notes, such as the technical specification, dangerous goods handling, and inspection notes against inventory items.

SYSPRO's multi-warehouse functionality enables you to create virtual warehouses to represent separate dangerous goods storage areas for specific items. Alternatively, you can use SYSPRO's multiple bin functionality to represent segregated storage areas for incompatible items within the same warehouse code.

Ensure Quality of Raw Materials and Monitoring During the Production Process

Chemical production plants are often highly automated with sophisticated measuring and testing systems designed to ensure quality of raw materials and work in progress, as well as high production yields. It is therefore desirable that any ERP production control and tracking system is able to integrate seamlessly with this process technology to exchange information and highlight issues at the relevant points. SYSPRO e.net solutions enables rapid development of secure and version-independent integration with such best-of-breed technology.

SYSPRO enables you to implement continuous improvement by helping you to identify problems and points of waste as they happen. Raw materials and manufactured products in the industry often vary in grade and quality, so tracking and control is essential to reduce waste, scrap and defects. SYSPRO enables you to specify approved manufacturers for raw material supplies and supplier performance can easily be tracked using queries and reports. In addition, SYSPRO facilitates the tracking of materials from purchase through production to customer, thereby maximizing quality control and providing you with the tools to manage product recalls, should they occur.

You can flag purchased items as requiring inspection so that during receipting, detailed records of counts, inspection, scrap, rejects and returns is recorded. Units in inspection are visible, but unavailable for use until accepted into stock. Similarly, SYSPRO's Work in Progress inspection system provides the tools for you to inspect manufactured product quality and, depending on the results, select to receipt, scrap or rework quantities.

Identify and Respond to Seasonal Demand Patterns

SYSPRO's Forecasting module gives you the tools to help you forecast future demand, based on seasonal, cyclical and trend demand patterns in your sales history, thereby enabling you to plan your production and purchasing to meet these requirements. A powerful Pareto analysis feature enables you to easily identify fast, slow and obsolete items in terms of sales value, gross profit, cost of sales, quantities sold or hits, so you can make decisions about which items to forecast, and the best method to use for each.

You can choose to create forecasts at stock code/warehouse level, and if the Families and Grouping module is installed, you can aggregate your forecasts into user-defined groupings. A variety of forecast calculation methods are available, including the competition method, and the module also provides facilities to track the forecast quality. Additionally, you can select to manually forecast items which require market intelligence, while selecting to batch forecast all other items, and there are facilities that enable you to filter or adjust sales history for outliers and other abnormalities. Multi-level analysis of product performance is available, including at stock code, warehouse, product class, supplier, planner and buyer levels, as well as at user-defined group level if the Families and Groupings module is installed.

The approved forecast becomes the demand input to SYSPRO's Material Requirements Planning system. This gives your planners and buyers visibility to the resources and actions required to meet the demand in the short, medium and long term.

Manage By-Products

SYSPRO provides a mechanism for configuring the manufacture of multiple items against a single bill of material, including those products that result from the manufacturing process but which are not included in demand planning.

This is useful for companies that produce by-products as a result of their manufacturing processes and who want to recycle, sell or use these by-products for some other value-added purpose, rather than write them off as unrecoverable scrap.

Manage Complex Production Recipes

SYSPRO's multi-level bill of materials functionality enables the definition of complex production recipes of up to 15 levels per route, and 10 routes per finished product. Control over recipe changes is seamlessly handled by the Engineering Change Control module, while a where-used query and substitution facility enables quick and easy replacement of ingredients. SYSPRO's powerful costing and what-if costing calculations, reports and queries provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of purchasing and production costs.

SThe work center and structures and routings facilities provide you with the means to define and maintain the elements required in a sequence of internal or subcontract manufacturing operations, as well as the structural relationships between parent and component parts. Phantom bills are catered for to accommodate transient production items, and planning bill functionality aids option forecasting and planning. In addition, the configuration and manufacture of multiple items which are produced in a single process are catered for by SYSPRO's co- and by-product features.

For each bill level, you can define ingredient quantities such as quantity per, fixed quantities or wet weight percentages in relation to that specific level's parent item. Component and operation copy, insertion, and move facilities enable straightforward maintenance of new and existing bills.

SYSPRO provides various operation run time methods, as well as material and progressive scrap functionality. The capture of various lead time elements enables accurate calculations of manufacturing and cumulative lead times, which in turn aid efficient materials planning and production scheduling, as well as product costing.

You can simulate the effects of varying batches sizes and subcontracting on product costs and lead times. You can also add information on tooling, operator skill levels, operation instructions and testing requirements to the operation and print these fields on SYSPRO's user-defined factory documentation.

The relationship validation function enables you to easily identify illogical relationships within your bills, while the structure validation function facilitates quick deletion of redundant or superseded components from bill of material structures.

The Work in Progress module enables seamless ingredient substitution where actual ingredients differ from planned. Furthermore, where intermediate or finished products differ from planned, the Work in Progress inspection functionality enables receipting of these products as alternate stock codes, or into alternate warehouses or bins.

SYSPRO's multimedia functionality enables you to attach visual and textual material, such as videos, photographs, and certificates of conformance, to structures and operations, to aid production and quality assurance staff, while custom forms enables you to create additional user-defined fields.

Manage Large and Diverse Inventories

SYSPRO provides the tools to help you optimize your inventory investment without sacrificing customer service. It enables you to effectively plan and control diverse and extensive product lines in a single or multi-warehouse environment, facilitating the creation of warehouses and bin locations to represent both physical and virtual stock locations.

Whether you stock, sell, purchase or manufacture items by unit, weight, volume, pack or container size, SYSPRO's multiple units of measure per stock item give you the flexibility to accurately record and track stock quantities. Product version control is automated through the Engineering Change Control module, while extensive master data enables you to define parameters for transacting in sales, purchasing and manufacturing.

Inventory Optimization functionality aids the sales and operation planning process. Decision-making on desired levels of inventory and customer service is enhanced through the graphical output from its powerful Pareto analysis and forecasting tools. Master information such as order policies, gross requirements rules, lead times, safety stock and minimum/maximum levels assist in planning replenishment, while extensive costing facilities ensure accurate costing of sales, purchase and manufacturing activities. Costing methods are available by warehouse and include the average, standard, last, FIFO, LIFO methods.

The custom forms feature gives you the freedom to define your own fields for the capture of details, such as hazardous goods information, enabling you to include these in your queries, reports and transaction documentation. Also, you can add standard notations per item for automatic inclusion in various transactions such as sales orders, purchase orders and jobs, as well as link multimedia files to key data.

SYSPRO's serial tracking and lot traceability features facilitate the tracking of materials from purchase through production to customer, thereby providing you with the tools to manage product recalls, should they occur, and the optional 2-phased receipting for purchased and manufactured products provides inspection control. The Goods in Transit system gives you comprehensive quantity, variance and cost control over inter-warehouse transfers, as well as providing input into SYSPRO's Distribution Requirements Planning.

The Stock Take system enables you to select on a range of criteria and continue transaction processing once the physical count is complete, so operations are not at a standstill while the count is being captured. Import facilities are available and you can run a number of verification and variance reports to highlight stock take exceptions and provide the necessary checks before confirmation.

SYSPRO's integrated nature and powerful reporting and query facilities give you visibility to detailed stock statuses and transaction history, while perpetual inventory costing provides at-a-glance valuation of stock holdings by warehouse and stock code . Queries include summary stock code quantities, such as warehouse on-hand, on-order, available, free, in-transit, in-inspection, allocated and back ordered, as well as the ability to drill-down to supporting detail.

Extensive reporting is available including detailed kardex movements, identification of obsolete, slow-moving and excessive inventories, as well as reports on summary inventory quantities and exceptions based on various stock level criteria. In addition, the Office Automation and Messaging module provides the ability to create alerts and events which are automatically fired when inventory exceptions, such as 'below minimum' occur.

Manage Product and Raw Material Traceability

Whether a compliance-critical requirement, or an analysis tool for continuous improvement strategies, the traceability of products from material origins through manufacture to final destination, is a key system requirement in many industries.

SYSPRO facilitates the recording of traceability and quality data on materials and products from purchasing through inspection, manufacturing, manufacturing inspection, stocking and sales. The recording of expiry and shelf-life information is also facilitated and powerful queries enable both upward and downward searches by stock code, lot number and transaction type.

SYSPRO's lot traceability and serial tracking functionality afford full visibility to the origins, build and customer destination of products and batches, thereby providing the means to easily trace and analyse the source of defects, should they occur. In addition, SYSPRO's Engineering Change Control module enables complete management and traceability of changes to product designs, while the Return Merchandise Authority module provide consistent handling of product returns, as well as analysis data for improvement programs.

Manage Customer Relationships and Service

The standard of service that you provide your customers makes all the difference in building solid relationships and gaining the competitive edge. This requires keeping track, not only of customer sales-related information, but also details of internal or external business relationships. To make better business decisions about expected customer, product and market activity, you need to have information in appropriate formats, and at different levels of detail, to carry out analysis.

SYSPRO's Contact Management system caters for multiple contacts to be assigned to organizations and individuals with whom you deal. These can include your customers and suppliers, as well as entities such as charities and government departments. You can group contacts for related entities and record details regarding interactions such as phone calls, emails and visits against the contact. Integration with Microsoft Outlook allows email correspondence to be sent and updated as an activity within the Contact Management system.

SYSPRO's Customer Relationship Management provides you with the functionality of the Contact Management System, as well as the tools to manage the track marketing campaigns, service issues, product returns, warranty and repair histories, quote and sales order information.

Your ability to deliver quality products faster, with more customer-specific features, and at stable or even reduced prices differentiates you in a discerning market place. Features such as available-to-promise and customer delivery performance reporting, provide information to help you improve your customer service levels and the Customer/stock code interchange functions gives you the flexibility to allow your customers to order by their part number.

SYSPRO enables you to keep a history of sales data as well as individual customer-related product activities, so you can easily identify buying patterns and preferences, and quickly create repeat orders by copying and amending previous ones. SYSPRO Forecasting uses sales history to identify trends and seasonal components of demand, thereby assisting you in calculating more accurate forecasts, which in turn leads to better planning and improved customer service levels.

SYSPRO's simple, extended and contract pricing mechanisms give you flexibility to apply one-dimensional pricing and discounting, or tailor these requirements to individual customers. Where customers are large organizations, such as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) or retails chains, with whom prices are negotiated on a contract or volume basis, more complex pricing is required. SYSPRO's pricing, trade management and sales analysis facilities enable you to provide acceptable pricing terms and delivery targets to large customers without sacrificing profitability.

Archiving

Archiving provides a mechanism of storing data that would normally be delete from the system, thus enabling non-current data to be removed from day-to-day files, but to still be accessible, through the standard query programs, should the need arise. Instead of merely deleting data at the time of performing a purge routine, SYSPRO creates a file in XML format that contains the purged data. This data is stored in a pre-defined location that can be queried using the standard Query programs. Within SYSPRO, you can archive the following: Sales orders, Jobs, Engineering change control bill of materials.

Backflushing

Within, SYSPRO, backflushing enables you to record the manufacture of items without having to create works orders. This is particularly relevant in situations where the production runs are short and the benefits derived from creating a works order to track the activity on the shop floor do not justify the cost of processing all the data normally required for a works order. Backflushing enables you to receipt a finished product into stock and simultaneously post the relevant labor transactions and deplete inventory of production materials based on the bill of materials of the finished product. The system uses the manufactured item's bill of materials to determine the material and labor charges to be included.

Bill of Materials

In SYSPRO, a bill of material comprises up to 15 levels of components and quantities together with the associated sequence of operations needed to make one production run of a product. It provides detailed costing at each level in the bill and facilitates an accurate expected cost against which to track actual production costs.

Blanket Purchase Orders

In SYSPRO, blanket purchase orders allow you to create, maintain and use contract purchase orders as well as monitor purchase order receipts against a supplier's contract.

The purpose of these contracts is to allow a fixed price to be recorded for a specified period and/or volume, plus an agreed delivery schedule. With extensive querying and reporting capabilities, you can centrally manage anticipated deliveries and review supplier delivery performance.

SYSPRO's Business-to-Business trading and e-commerce solution contract details can be exported into XML format for electronic exchange with trading partners.

By-Products

By-products in SYSPRO enable you to process the unplanned manufacture of parts from a job. They are defined against an operation in the Bill of Material and can be receipted into stock at any point in the manufacturing process.

Co-Products

Co-products in SYSPRO enable you to process the planned manufacture of multiple parts from one job. They are configuring as multiple made-in items against a single bill of material's structure and routing.

Dangerous Goods Text

Dangerous goods text can be defined against a stock item to provide information on how to handle potentially dangerous stock codes and can optionally automatically be inserted as comment lines when capturing Sales and Purchase orders

Distribution Requirements Planning

Distribution requirements planning in SYSPRO is designed to optimize the movement of inventory in a multi-warehouse environment so that demands can be met effectively and efficiently without relying on excessive stock holdings. Distribution Requirements Planning provides the drivers that enable the Requirements planning module to suggest Supply Chain Transfers from one warehouse to another, rather than a purchase order on an external supplier, or a job on production. Suggestions are based on the closest warehouse in a chain of supplying warehouses, resulting in stock being supplied from oversupplied warehouses to those with a demand. A comprehensive view of the supply chain for each item is available.

Companies in either the wholesale or manufacturing sectors which have regional demand fed by one or more supply warehouses, or manufacturing plants, would typically use Distribution Requirements Planning. The integration between SYSPRO's Inventory, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Bills of Materials, Work in Progress and Requirements Planning modules provides a comprehensive view up and down the supply chain.

Forecasting

SYSPRO's Forecasting uses sales history to indicate past inventory demand that can be passed through an algorithm to project future sales forecasts. These draft forecasts can either be manually changed and converted to live forecasts (high value/volume items) or automatically converted to live forecasts (batch forecast).

Multiple Warehouses

Within SYSPRO you use multiple warehouses to record stock holdings stored at multiple physical or virtual locations. Stock transactions and various quantity type summaries such as on hand, on order and on backorder are stored per warehouse. In addition costs, minimum, maximum, safety re-order and pallet quantities are held per warehouse. With visibility of inventory across multiple locations, inventory managers, planners and purchasers have the information to rationalize and optimize inventory levels and sales staff and customers can easily determine product availability.

Purchase Order Inspection

Purchase order inspection permits predefined inspectible items to be receipted into an inspection file on receipt. Then the goods will be inspected and either accept, reject, or scrap, before updating the stock on hand.

Where Used

SYSPRO's Component Where-Used Query enables you to quickly establish exactly where a raw material or intermediary is used within a bill of material structure. It displays all finished products to which the item is attached, including the sequence number, quantity relationship, part category and operation.

Within the Engineering Change Control module, you can use the Where-used Query program to identify all products affected by the raising of an engineering change order for all routes identified as being under engineering change control.

In addition, SYSPRO provides the BOM Replace Where-used program to enable you to quickly replace an item with a valid substitute component in those bills of material in which it is used, which helps streamline the introduction of product design changes.

Work In Progress Inspection

The WIP Inspection programs enable you to inspect made-in stock items before accepting them into stock. The items are received from the job, into inspection and can then either be returned for rework, scrapped or accepted into stock.