Benefits of Using an ERP Software For Manufacturing
Benefits of using an ERP Software For Manufacturing
Making the decision to invest in a new ERP system is no small task. It is important to consider all of the factors that will go into making this decision, such as scalability, maturity, and the ability to handle complex supply chain functions and shop floor automation. ERP implementation can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive.
By choosing a new ERP platform, a manufacturing company is investing in a product with a long lifecycle that will impact their business for many years to come.
It is imperative that owners and decision-makers tasked with the decision of purchasing a new ERP do so with a balance of cost, ease of use, lifecycle changes, and especially, the unique needs of their company within their industry.
Competitive Edge
In order to maintain a competitive edge in the manufacturing industry, it is important to have the right software in place. Many manufacturing companies are turning to ERP software to help them manage their business more efficiently.
Manufacturing ERP software can automate tasks and help you make better decisions about your manufacturing process. In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of ERP software for manufacturers and how they can help you streamline your business!
In some instances when a company is in its early stages of growth, it often experiences rapid expansion in product offerings and manufacturing volume.
This can lead to the fragmentation of data where different software systems are used by different departments to control operations.
As the company scales, these problems can become increasingly difficult to manage and can even cause production processes to become disorganized and out of control.
Kechie ERP
To avoid the many struggles that come with both growth and unsatisfactory ERP systems for Manufacturing, many companies are turning to Kechie ERP for manufacturing software.
With Kechie, My Office Apps offers a robust, right-sized ERP software for Manufacturing that can handle the needs of any business - small or large. With our My Office Apps integration, you'll have everything you need to run your business at your fingertips.
Some of the features that work in particular for Manufacturing:
- CRM
- Logistics
- Procurement
- Multi-Location Management
- Complete Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Management
- Customer Support Order Management
- Production
Kechie features hundreds of reports and thousands of configurations designed to provide the most accurate information in real-time. Every configuration can be saved for future use. All reports come standard out-of-the-box with no limits on how many reports users can generate.
Contact us today to schedule a demo and see what Kechie and My Office Apps can do for you and your business.
5 Good Reasons To Use Automated Order Management Software
5 Good Reasons To Use Automated Order Management Software
Automated Order Management Software
Modern warehouses and wholesale distributors have begun to adapt to the cloud revolution. They are making their way to cloud-based, fully integrated solutions. With the fluctuating restrictions imposed due to the COVID pandemic, cloud-based software has become a necessity. Order management software can help any business, but order management software should do more for your company than organize sales orders and sales information.
The right software can make all the difference when running a business. It's an essential part of being able to provide goods and services on a timely basis. Companies can prevent price increases and variations in their profit margins. Having this complex information is of little use when your software doesn't think for itself. Who has time to research and monitor every single order? How do you know who purchased what? How do you know when it is time to fill orders? If you answered none of these questions or took longer to answer them, why not automate them? You see benefits such as:
1. More Effective Sales Teams
Sourcing data is one thing; storing that data is another. Warehouse and order automation offers tremendous potential for companies. Still, you'll just be wasting time implementing an order management system that doesn't provide your sales reps the data they need without the proper infrastructure. An adequate order management system should monitor and track the input of a sales order, critical customer, and shipping information. Knowledge is empowering, and an empowered sales staff is more productive than spending time collecting basic information.
2. Reduce Time Spent on Customer Service
The faster you can resolve problems, the fewer steps it will take you to complete your day-to-day tasks. With customer service procedures such as RMAs (return merchandise authorizations) being automated, it can make managing your busy schedule more manageable. Automating mundane or repetitive tasks such as tracking lot numbers, serial numbers, and warranties can speed up the efficacy of customer service. Automated order management software is not a tool used by your company but instead an extension of your departments to increase productivity while removing unnecessary processes simultaneously.
3. Reduce Opportunities for Errors
The amount of effort every employee puts into ensuring accuracy has shown to increase productivity. Still, in a business world replacing humans with AI-powered software, accuracy and speed are no longer exclusive but are necessities. Automated data entry systems have proven to increase warehouse productivity. But they can also cause significant errors—for instance, mistakenly shipping products to customers who don't need them. Recent reports show that over 50% of data feed errors are due to human error. A sound order management system will check these mistakes constantly, notifying managers and other workers of any problems.
4. Reduce Manual Entries
Manual data entry is time-consuming and error-prone, but these common problems can be solved using the latest organizational technology. Implementing these advanced technologies, such as barcodes or QR codes, is not the headache it used to be. In the olden days, manual data entry meant punching holes in sheets of paper, scanning and entering document info, and endless spreadsheets. Today automated order management systems can do tedious jobs much more efficiently and accurately. Integrating these technologies is no longer a labor-intensive exercise. Having organized warehouses, racks, and bins can improve sales order fulfillment times and customer service satisfaction rates. With an organized warehouse that integrates with an order management solution, the time spent manually inputting data has been either significantly reduced or eliminated.
5. Gain Insight Into Company Performance
Gaining visibility into your organization's performance is crucial, tracking purchases and costs, managing inventory, and reporting earnings, just to name a few. There's no better way to do this than through data. Order management systems are sitting on treasure troves of customer and sales data. Your ability to interpret that data is only as good as your reporting tools. Businesses with an order management system that can quickly monitor, track, and display critical data can provide managers with the necessary insights to make informed business decisions.
Kechie's Robust Solution
When it comes to AI-powered order management systems, Kechie is truly the next generation. The fully integrated order management system is a genuine business improvement solution. Kechie can handle all incoming sales orders, help organize inventory, and update accounting and financial departments in real-time. Kechie accomplishes this by living on the cloud, utilizing proprietary software to ensure accuracy and speed no matter who is using it.
Contact the experts at My Office Apps today to schedule a demo and see what our order management system can do for you.
Improve business efficiency with Artificial Intelligence
Are Your Employees Spending Too Much Time on the Hamster Wheel?
In previous blogs, we described how Artificial Intelligence techniques (AI) in an ERP system can help improve efficiency and accuracy in your operations. It can also free up employee resources with extra time for creative activities to add value for your business. In this blog, we will describe one feature in our Kechie™ ERP system that uses AI techniques to automatically generate a whole series of new part numbers.
In any business, a critical item used in tracking almost every transaction is the Part Number or SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). Part numbers are used in sales orders, purchase orders, manufacturing, inventory tracking, invoicing and everywhere in between. The use of part numbers creates differentiation between multiple items for ordering, picking and packing the exact item requested by the customer. Many companies have thousands (or millions) of part numbers in their system. Managing this giant mass of data can become impossible without strong processing software to assist along the way.
New part number creation is one activity that can be quite time consuming for your staff, particularly when a large number of new part numbers need to be added at the same time. For the apparel industry, this can be a daunting task. For example, a buyer wants to add a new style shirt to the inventory. The shirt is available in long-sleeved and short-sleeved, classic and slim fit, sizes include extra small, small, medium, large, extra-large, and available in the sixteen colors. That’s 320 new sku’s to be added to the system. One-by-one, an employee sits in front of a screen and adds new parts numbers – perhaps a multiple day project. Is there a better use of this resource?
Here’s where a built-in intelligence can save the day. Kechie delivers a function that can automatically create part numbers and add them to the system. An employee can now focus on descriptions and selling features for a quick-to-market process rather than being bogged down with keystrokes. The artificial intelligence features in Kechie not only help set up new products – but can help your sales staff to up-sell features and products to maximize profitability. More will be revealed on this feature in coming blogs.
My Office Apps, Inc., a business process improvement company, is committed to providing continued improvements and incorporating various advanced AI techniques in our Kechie ERP software. Our goal is to provide the best processing solutions for small and medium sized businesses in order to contribute to the success of our customers. In the coming weeks, we will post additional articles that describe some of the specific AI features present in the Kechie ERP software and also provide a road map for other features that we expect to implement in the future. Our focus is not to just provide AI for AI’s sake, but rather to implement practical AI functions that can make a real difference in your business. For more information, you can visit www.myofficeapps.com or better yet, call us at (949) 486-1947 and ask us to schedule a demo so you can view these features for yourself.
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Win Big with ERP: AI Solutions to Influence Your Bottom Line
Win Big with ERP: Artificial Intelligence Solutions to influence Your Bottom Line
One of the hottest topics in IT today is Artificial Intelligence (AI). By continuing to automate certain functions using sophisticated AI algorithms, one can free up employee resources for more creative activities that will add further value for your business. Although some believe that AI may replace more mundane jobs, our belief is exactly the opposite. AI will help create an increased number of less-repetitive jobs in your organization making it more innovative, more responsive to your customer’s needs, and more successful. AI will also bring operational benefits with an ability to reduce errors and improve processing times for various transactions that will decrease costs and improve customer satisfaction.
AI incorporates the ability to find trends in a large collection of data and provide insights that may not be obvious to a person looking at gigabytes of data. Many AI programs incorporate the ability to learn from previous activities and allow one to develop more accurate forecasts and predictions.
AI technology can make a positive impact in multiple areas of your business. These can include:
- Inventory Management – By helping to provide more accurate forecasts — optimizing supply chains — figuring out the most efficient way to store the inventory — and tracking product lifecycles, various AI techniques can improve costs, decrease waste, and improve cycle times.
- Production Management – Figuring out the most optimal way to process your backlog in your manufacturing plant can become a horribly complex problem. Utilization of AI techniques can figure out the best ways to select what order to process the jobs in your backlog, which machines to use, maintenance scheduling, and overall logistics as the work-in-process moves through the manufacturing cycle. These optimizations can help decrease the amount of capital equipment needed, improve cycle times, and lower costs.
- Sales – One of the most profitable ways of improving your sales is to implement sophisticated upsells and cross-selling approaches. A sophisticated AI algorithm can help by analyzing, in real-time, what additional products to recommend based on previous customer history and other information.
- Financial Management – Besides automating various financial functions, an AI program can help a financial manager make various key decisions, such as how much cash to keep on hand, whether a capital investment will pay off, and double-check financial statements for accuracy.
- Marketing – A key marketing function is to develop the best and most effective message for your marketing campaign based upon a variety of factors. These include customer demographics, competitive challenges, historical performance, product attributes and many others. Analyzing these factors can involve looking at a great deal of data. By utilizing advanced analytics, a good AI program can help a marketing manager sift through all these factors and create the most effective marketing campaign.
As part of our mission to be a business process improvement company, My Office Apps, Inc. is committed to providing continued improvements and incorporate various advanced AI techniques in our Kechie™ ERP software. Our goal is to provide the best solutions for small and medium sized businesses with the latest techniques to contribute to the success of our customers. In the coming weeks, we will post additional articles that describe some of the specific AI features we have already incorporated into our Kechie software and also provide a roadmap for other features we expect to implement in the near future. Our focus is not to provide AI for AI’s sake, but rather to implement practical AI functions that can make a real difference to your bottom line. For more information, visit www.myofficeapps.com, or better yet, call us at (949) 486-1947 and we will schedule a demo so you can view these features for yourself.
5 Ways AI is Changing our World for the Better
5 Ways AI is Changing our World for the Better
Man has long feared the rise of the machine – his own creation becoming smarter and more intelligent than he. But while artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly changing our world and powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, humanity does not need to be afraid.
Creating New Jobs
“Artificial intelligence will change the workforce,” affirms Carolyn Frantz, Microsoft’s Corporate Secretary. The bleak view of AI as a job killer is but one side of the coin: while 75 million jobs may disappear, as many as 133 million more engaging, less repetitive new roles are expected to be created. AI “is an opportunity for workers to focus on the parts of their jobs that may also be the most satisfying to them,” says Frantz.
Bridging Language Divides
Whether it’s teaching new languages in a personalized way or translating speech and text in real-time, AI-powered language tools from Duo lingo to Skype are bridging social and cultural divides in our workplaces, classrooms and everyday lives. Digital translation services are not “perfect,” admits Microsoft education leader Mark Sparvell, but “they offer a means of understanding” that might not otherwise be possible.
Transforming Government
Less paperwork, quicker responses, a more efficient bureaucracy – AI has the power to drastically change public administration, but are governments ready? This tech comes with both risks and opportunities that need to be understood and evaluated. Academic Kevin Desouza believes gamification and role-playing could be the key to public servants analyzing complex cases, coming up with better solutions, and truly understanding the future of autonomous systems.
Delivering Health Care
AI has the potential to make health care “much more accessible and more affordable,” insists Paul Bates, director of NHS services at Babylon Health. Babylon, an app that offers symptom checking and fast access to physicians if needed, is providing advice to more than one million residents in central London through an AI-powered chatbot. Patients can get an accurate, safe, and convenient answer in seconds – and save health care providers’ money too.
Creating Art
Computational creativity is drastically changing the nature of art. Software, more than a tool, is becoming a creative collaborator, merging computer scientist with artist. As Austrian artist Sonja Bäumel assures, “The exhibition space becomes a lab; art becomes an expression of science, and the artist is the researcher.”
Rey, M., (2019, June 25). 5 Ways AI is Changing Our World for the Better. Retrieved from https://www.salzburgglobal.org/news/latest-news/article/5-ways-ai-is-changing-our-world-for-the-better.html
About My Office Apps, Inc.
My Office Apps, Inc. (MOA) is a leader in business improvement software solutions to automate your organization. Building on three decades of software design and development, MOA delivers Kechie™, a transformative business tool. Kechie is a fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with a simplified user experience and the latest in cloud technology. It is quick and easy to implement without the expensive price tag. Sold in separate packages – inventory and warehouse management (CRM, Sales, Procurement, Logistics included), manufacturing, finance – or a fully configured ERP system to include all of these individual tools. Kechie is easily configured to the scalable needs of your growing business. For more information on managing your business processes more efficiently and effectively, visit www.kechie.com or www.myofficeapps.com.
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