Manufacturing Organizations Have Unique Challenges
The manufacturing domain has industries with higher capital costs and greater usage of resources and facilities than typical companies. Additionally, heavy industry and manufacturing firms face unique logistics issues while maximizing efficiency. Maximizing efficiency involves every step in their production process, from obtaining raw materials and the timing of those materials to keep work in progress pipelines minimal to billing their customers and managing accounts receivables. XBOSoft’s clients with these challenges include a wide range of industries:
- Chemicals and plastics
- Steel and oil refining, production
- Mining and industrial machinery
- Mass transit (railways, airlines, shipbuilders)
Manufacturing Depends on Timing and Allocation of Resources
Getting the components to build their products at the right time and place in order to minimize holdings while optimizing production requires an intricate balance of working with their suppliers while understanding their own manufacturing capabilities, limitations, and effectiveness. As such, manufacturing has now become a software business as software is ultimately required to optimize their workflows and materials. Any manufacturing organization that ignores optimizing its processes will be left behind.
Manufacturing Depends on Integration
Organizations in the manufacturing domain have the unique challenge in that there is probably no “one fits all” software that can meet their business needs. As such, we have found that most organizations use several software packages for a best-of-breed strategy, or perhaps try to use one package to the extent they can, but perhaps suffer from a one fits all package that doesn’t have certain functionalities they need. Packages from different software providers could include capabilities such as:
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Supply Chain Management
- Accounting and Finance
- Inventory Management
- Demand Forecasting
As such, XBOSoft understands that manufacturing software testing is critical for these organizations in several facets including:
- Integration – With different best-in-breed software packages working together, each possibly with customizations, data, and workflow integration is crucial as one mishap can affect an entire workflow or even production line.
- Data integrity – Data must be consistent from one source to the next and available in real-time. This is especially critical in getting the right materials in at the right time, and at the end, during the billing process adding all the critical cost components.
- Data source accuracy – With sensors everywhere collecting data, it’s critical that this data not only be accurate, but timely, and that routines that depend on them have the right level of sensitivity given that some data will be errant.
All manufacturing organizations are now dependent on software to manage supply chain logistics to operate their businesses efficiently. The “right” amount of inventory at each stage with accurate demand forecasting requires maintaining balance while avoiding logistical errors. And with large investments in plant and equipment, it’s also critical to minimize Non-Productive-Time (NPT). XBOSoft works with manufacturing organizations to ensure that software, its functionality, and quality, are supporting them in reaching their production objectives.
Next steps: Find out more about how we can help you increase software quality and its integration into your business processes. Contact us.
What our clients have to say…
What our clients have to say…