Conquering Chaos in Manufacturing and Distribution

With chaos or “chronic uncertainty” emerging as the dominant operational mode around the globe, manufacturers and distributors can no longer rely on competitive differentiation alone. The next generation of supply chain success stories will depend on chaos-friendly business processes.

What does this mean? Well, the good news is, it results in improved performance, shorter lead-times, better quality, less waste, and lower costs. For you to embrace this new business paradigm, flexibility, agility, and looking for ways to improve your customer service will lead to increased inventory turnover and reduced lead times. It is essential that companies anticipate and understand the external impact changes have on their operations, plans and competitiveness, before they happen. Then, the order is to proactively prepare themselves to thrive and grow in this new reality. Monitoring forecasts and using business intelligence applications to help detect trends and predict changes are superpowers. Put simply, the best way to manage constant uncertainty is to meet it with certainty.

For most manufacturers and distributors, success likely depends on information stored in numerous places and on many (sometimes antiquated or underused) systems. Critical data used to make decisions, is housed on obsolete and disparate technology platforms, in spreadsheets, on paper, or worse—in someone’s head. Rightsizing the technology solutions to your organization can simplify, streamline, and centralize existing data and processes. Meeting the inevitable chaos with absolute certainty is a large part of a powerful arsenal.

NetSuite Manufacturing Edition offers an integrated inventory, warehouse management, accounting, and financial management platform that ties in order management, customer relationship management (CRM), and e-Commerce. A cloud-based solution that can be delivered remotely over the web, NetSuite can be used by manufacturing businesses to:

• manage production orders
• ensure production inventory replenishment is optimized
• deliver quality products in a timely and efficient manner

Managing anything inventory is easier with NetSuite’s multi-location inventory, work orders & assemblies, bill of materials, diverse methods of measurement, barcoding procedures, and other necessary business processes in the manufacturing industry. It can also integrate shipping processes with mainstream carriers, such as FedEx, USPS, and UPS.

NetSuite Manufacturing can help track down leads and turn them into finalized orders, while also tracking the association between production and revenue for manufacturing companies. The business dashboard is customizable and allows monitoring of real-time business operations. Ease-of-use allows end-users to adapt NetSuite to specific role requirements with “clicks not code” philosophy. It can be configured to provide real-time insights into key performance indicators—an intuitive dashboard provides a 360⁰ view of business operations and enables any issue to be investigated thoroughly. Since it’s a cloud-based application, manufacturers can benefit from NetSuite’s rich functionality quicker and lower upfront costs compared to legacy approaches.

Managing chronic uncertainty in these times takes sophisticated tools to predict and meet it with certainty in the systems and processes, so companies can be flexible and pivot to be chaos-friendly.