Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.

1. Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. 
2. Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best. 
3. Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.

Poor performance indicators make for poor outcomes.

Companies today continue to tolerate and accept how labor and production information is recorded, and the reliability on that information is questionable. In addition to collecting labor and production information, there are many other pieces of information manually recorded from the shop floor.

A critical element of information for productivity throughput would be to examine how much time the work center or machine was actually up and running. Downtime is another critical element of data that is usually manually recorded along with a reason identifying what caused production to stop. If this information is not provided on a timely and accurate basis, then what good is it anyway? Forms are filled out, data may or may not be keyed to a spreadsheet, the forms are sorted and filed, but is anybody really looking at the information that was recorded? Think about the amount of time it takes to manage the manual collection of information from your shop floor. 

What would real time access to data mean to your organization?
The benefits:

1. Real Time Production Visibility
2. Reduced Paperwork Load
3. Downtime and Scrap Visibility
4. WIP Inventory Visibility
5. Improve Efficiency, Capacity Utilization

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Happy New Year! January is always a great time to reflect on the prior year – what went well, and what didn’t. It is also the obvious time to plan for the coming year – what do I want to accomplish and how can I best achieve my goals?

As the saying goes, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”, so if you haven’t already, it is time to start putting processes, procedures and programs in place within your company to measure how well each department is doing against their objectives. Start to analyze your numbers and publish them internally. Where are you at currently? Where do you want to be? Seeing both sets of numbers pushes employees to hit those targets. Do this now, and you’ll be seeing positive results before you know it!  

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1. GRINYA RECONCILIATION – WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

2. ERP SETUP - PROS & CONS

3. OPTIONALLY INCLUDE TAX AMOUNTS IN ORDER BALANCE

Clack Corporation, a leader in water treatment and plastic processing, has gone live with Infor LN 10.4. The Crossroads RMC team partnered with Clack in this very important technology initiative for the company. With Clack’s dominance in the industry, they were challenged to provide a top-notch ERP system that would keep up with their ever-expanding business needs. LN 10.4 provides the right tools, specifically geared towards industrial manufacturers such as Clack. Combined with the Crossroads RMC Shop Floor Data Collection Solution for LN, Clack is positioned very well for growth in the years ahead.

I'm reposting this checklist for things to consider in order to finish out the current year, and plan for next year…

• Are your accounting records up to date so you can make a projection of how the current year will turn out?
• Are all account reconciliations up to date to facilitate the closing of the books after year end?
• Are there accounts receivable that should be reserved for or written off prior to the end of the year?
• If your business carries inventory, do you need to plan a physical count as of the end of the year?
• Has depreciation on your fixed assets been recorded during the year? Have you considered depreciation on current year additions?
• Have all new asset purchases and bank loans been recorded on your books?
• Are there any liabilities, for example, pending legal actions or warranty issues, which will need to be recorded prior to year end? 
• Do you have a plan in place to properly “cut-off” revenue at year-end to properly match revenue and expense?
• Will there be bonuses, profit sharing contributions or discretionary retirement plan contributions paid prior to the end of the year? How will these payments affect cash flow?
• Will you be in compliance with your bank covenants at year end?
• Do you need to make arrangements to receive statements as of the end of the year for cash value of life insurance, loan balances, etc.?

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Key Performance Indicators measure how effectively your performance objectives are being achieved.

• Have you defined KPIs for your company?
• Are you measuring them effectively?
• Is everyone in your company aware of what the KPIs are?

If you haven’t already done so, consider tying personal performance objectives directly to the company’s performance objectives. Doing so can greatly increase the likelihood that the company’s goals will be met.

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If you’re not already, consider generating your financial statements directly out of Baan/LN. In the Financial Statements module, you can define and print financial and consolidated statements. These statements can be based on various cross sections of your General Ledger account and dimension structure. You can also define cash flow statements, which can be based on cash flow reasons.

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