Real Results

Industrial and commercial machinery manufacturers achieve significant results by implementing Made2Manage ERP. Our customers typically experience:

• 5-23% reductions in inventory and associated carrying costs
• 13-22% reductions in product lead times
• 96-97% on-time promise-to-delivery rates

Engineered To Your Specifications

Consona understands your business and has designed a system specifically tailored to your needs. Whether you are an engineer-to-order (ETO), make-to-order (MTO), assemble-to-order (ATO) or mixed-mode manufacturer, you may be striving to manage:

An Industrial-strength Solution

The power of Made2Manage ERP lies in the ability of the software to streamline critical manufacturing and service processes common in the industrial and commercial machinery industry. In particular, Made2Manage excels in the following areas:

• Integrating engineering and production activities
• Supporting non-standard parts
• Rolling up job and project costs
• Tracking all service and repair work
• Managing cash flow with progress billing
• Forecasting demand to ensure sufficient components supply
• Configuring products

Let’s examine how Made2Manage administers these critical functions.

Integrating Engineering And Production Activities

As changes occur in the design of your custom-built or custom-configured jobs, our 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 communicate any necessary revisions to the shop floor in real time. With a disciplined engineering change process, you can enhance customer satisfaction, increase production efficiencies, and control costs.

Supporting Non-standard Parts

Since many of your orders are “one-of-a-kind” jobs, Made2Manage ERP delivers the flexibility to support non-standard buy or make items not currently in the item master. It’s easy to create routings for non-standard parts that are linked to quotes, sales orders, and job orders. What’s more, since you are not required to create an item master for every part, you can save time on data entry and focus on fulfilling orders. The Made2Manage BOM builder is customizable so you can set it up to work the way you do—set filters, determine what parts to choose and adjust display attributes. With the added capability of building products independent from an item master, you can better monitor costs and meet your production schedule.

Rolling Up Job And Project Costs

Made2Manage can help industrial and commercial machinery manufacturers like you take more proactive measures to protect your profit margins as production costs fluctuate.

The order-costing feature provides the visibility you need to monitor costs throughout your entire production process, including capturing changes as they occur in the production process, tracking costs as they vary from the initial order, and determining what costs the customer has added to the order. You can accumulate costs (and unplanned costs) as they flow through the system so you can see where you are spending your money in the manufacturing process. In addition, you can analyze costs in job orders and inventory and transfer them to the general ledger.

Tracking All Service And Repair Work

Consona understands the importance you place on providing off-site service and warranty support for your customers. Our M2M Field Service is designed to help you track all service and repair work on machines at your customer sites. As a manufacturer of complex machinery and equipment, M2M Field Service can be a real asset in scheduling installations, ongoing maintenance and service. You can quickly review your customers’ configuration, service history and warranty information. Furthermore, you can see your service technicians’ schedules and generate labor reports to track costs and billable hours. The M2M Field Service provides readily available machine and equipment information helping you to provide responsive service to your customers by tracking issues and instituting the necessary product improvements.

Managing Cash Flow With Progress Billing

You can easily manage the billing process for larger capital equipment jobs and/or projects with longer lead times with the Made2Manage Progress Billing feature. Whether you choose to invoice based on the date, time applied, or material used by job, the Progress Billing feature will help you generate the cash flow you need. With the flexible Progress Billing application, you can select the type of billing you need for each job—including periodic, time and material, and percentage complete. Revenue may be recognized immediately or assigned to an unearned revenue account to hold payments until the order is shipped. In addition, you can use Progress Billing reporting features to display the costs of the sales order line item, periodic billing criteria, total sales order line item, future billings and dates and total costs to date.

Forecasting Demand

Making sure you have the right supply of components on hand at the right time can be a real challenge. Customer expectations, vendor delivery dates, and lengthy production schedules can interfere with your lead times. To help you decrease your stated lead times, you can use the M2M Demand Forecasting tool to make sound decisions on medium-term production plans, long-term capacity plans, purchasing requirements, and inventory balances. With M2M Demand Forecasting, you can generate quick and accurate forecasts for finished goods, key sub-assemblies and parts—helping you to manage the key underlying demand factors that impact delivery times. You also can employ M2M Demand Forecasting to predict how often (by percentage) various subcomponents will be used within your BOMs—this helps you to make better production and purchasing decisions. Through accurate demand forecasting, you can improve customer service, lower inventory-carrying costs and free-up cash.

Configuring Products

To ensure customer satisfaction, you can seamlessly manage the complex components and part structures used to build your industrial machinery products during the quoting or sales order process with the M2M 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.