Electrifying Results

Electronics manufacturers have seen significant results from implementing Made2Manage ERP. Customers in the industry typically experience:

• 8-21% reductions in inventory and associated carrying costs
• 7-16% reductions in product lead times
• 96-97% on-time promise-to-delivery rates

Staying Current With A Transforming Industry

With the pace of the electronics industry accelerating and reduced product lifecycles, there is increasing pressure to get your manufactured goods to market faster. We recognize that producing components, circuit boards, wiring devices, switchgear or other electrical equipment can require significant engineering and coordination with suppliers. You may experience the demands of managing:

With Made2Manage ERP, you can turn these challenges into competitive advantages for your electronics manufacturing business.

Unique Software Components

Consona has developed specific applications to help you manage the unique demands of your electronics manufacturing business. While there are many features that our customers use every day in managing their operations, we have become a fixture in the electronics industry for our strength in providing the following key capabilities:

• Managing components with BOM reference designators (bubble numbers)
• Sourcing parts and sub-contractors
• Collaborating with suppliers
• Configuring products and managing engineering change
• Planning and scheduling jobs
• Integrating your supply chain systems (EDI)

Managing Components With BOM Reference Designators (Bubble Numbers)

The complexity of your multi-level bills of material (BOMs) means that you have to manage many components. To help you build flatter, more condensed BOMs, you can use the Made2Manage reference designator feature to quickly and easily reference individual components at the operation level and determine where these items are used in your manufacturing process. What’s more, your engineering and production departments will have a clear view of the required product configuration for each job so you can jumpstart fulfillment and win more business by reduced lead times.

Sourcing Parts and Sub-contractors

Short lead times, intense competition, and price pressures are forcing more electronics manufacturers to focus on their core competencies—therefore, outsourcing has become a critical practice in the production process. Of course, managing numerous supplier relationships for the same components and different items can become a complex task. Made2Manage reference designators allow you to easily manage the relationship between your parts, the associated manufacturers and their part numbers, as well as the vendors that can source those part numbers. Reference designators also can help you source the origins of the components within your product so you can track vendor performance and quality.

Collaborating With Suppliers

Managing supplier relationships can require considerable collaboration. Make use of the Made2Manage ERP enterprise portal, M2M VIP to help you better coordinate the stream of sub-contracted components and materials, you can make use of the Made2Manage ERP enterprise portal, M2M VIP. M2M VIP collaboration software keeps your key suppliers aligned with your production priorities by providing them with real-time visibility into your shop floor. For instance, your select vendors can share CAD drawings, track inventory levels and respond to RFQs right over the Web. The effective coordination with your vendors helps you keep the right flow of components and materials coming into your production facilities at the right time. With improved supplier communication, you can more effective manage your inventory levels to reduce carrying costs and increase cash flow.

Configuring Products and Managing Engineering Change

To ensure customer satisfaction, you can seamlessly manage the complex components and part structures used to build your electronics products during the quoting or sales order process with the Made2Manage Product Configurator. The drag-and-drop configurator conceals the complexity of your part structures from your customers while displaying the detailed information (e.g. CAD drawings, quality documents) your employees need to complete quotes or sales orders. The Product Configurator will create a unique BOM for each item of a quote and sales order and also can generate unique, multi-level BOMs and SmartPart numbers—making it easier to issue materials to the shop floor. What’s more, you can define configuration rules to ensure the profitability of your products.

As changes occur in the design of your custom-built or custom-configured jobs, Made2Manage’s engineering change management feature provides you with a full auditing of critical documents and multiple revision levels for the item master, standard BOMs, and routing records. The seamless flow of data makes it easy for you to determine the effect of design changes on your entire organization and helps you communicate revisions to the shop floor in real time.

Planning and Scheduling Jobs

With real-time Made2Manage Advanced Planning and Scheduling (theory-of-constraints-based) applications, you can more effectively synchronize the demand for your products with your production capabilities, optimize the use of your capital-intensive resources, improve customer satisfaction and get more products out the door faster.

Since you may have capacity constraints, make-to-stock processes and long lead times on your purchased components, you can use M2M Advanced Planning to respond to changes in demand by generating an automated, capacity-based daily build plan for a leaner shop floor. To help you balance competing demands, you can synchronize the processes that have the most impact on your delivery dates and generate the most profitable set of jobs while setting customer expectations than you can meet.

Once you’ve generated your jobs, M2M Advanced Scheduling can help you to quickly schedule and sequence all the activities in your work centers so you can meet your due dates. The Theory-of-Constraints-based scheduling tool identifies, buffers and protects your shop floor’s critically constrained resource and keeps it running smoothly by subordinating other resources to that bottleneck. Furthermore, you can constrain schedules based on secondary work centers and/or the availability of purchased components. M2M Advanced Scheduling also can determine precise need dates for purchasing your materials so you can stay lean and acquire components just-in-time.

Integrating Your Supply Chain Systems (EDI)

With constant pressure to remain responsive to your larger original equipment-manufacturing customers and manage smaller suppliers, it has become increasingly critical to automate communication and file exchange throughout the supply chain. To help you speed up your supply chain and reduce administration costs, Made2Manage offers two business-to-business enterprise integration solutions. You can conduct traditional Electronic Data Interchange Infrastructure (EDII) with M2M EDI.

EDII is the application-to-application exchange of business documents through third-party Value-Added Networks (VANs). These VANs act as intermediaries that translate, store and send documents between disparate systems. Consequently, third-party VANs often establish a commonly understood document format, or EDI wrapper, that enables data transmission between the systems.

M2M EDI-XML, by contrast, is a unique collection of software and Web services that allows you to link to other customer and supplier systems using EDI, XML and flat files. M2M EDI-XML uses extensible Markup Language (XML), a universal Web language, to segment data from the manner in which it is displayed and formatted within different systems. Unlike M2M EDII, XML files do not have to be wrapped and unwrapped by third-party translation software. With M2M EDI-XML, Made2Manage single-handedly hosts and manages your enterprise integration solution. In addition, M2M EDI-XML supports both X12 documents and RosettaNet trading networks. These collaboration tools help you streamline your supply chain and build loyal, long-term relationships with your customers.