Manufacturers today can no longer afford to ignore the challenges that their sector faces but need to deal with and overcome them proactively. The main difficulties that industrial equipment manufacturers can come across include an incomplete view of their profitability, lack of insight into the supply chain, and the means to collaborate productively across the various stakeholders.
The usual response of manufacturers is to install an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to access these functionalities. While this is a commendable first step, it may not hold the complete solution. What you need is to add an enhancer that will provide you with the specific functionalities you need as an industrial equipment manufacturer. This way, the integration between your manufacturing requirements and ERP would be complete, and you will be able to overcome the six key challenges that industrial equipment manufacturers have.
What are the key challenges of industrial equipment manufacturers?
1. Engineering challenges
In the process of manufacturing, the receipt of change orders, recording, and translating these to engineering changes within projects can be a significant issue. You need to have a structured process to handle engineering changes that you can coordinate with the help of mobile access to ensure that instant action can be taken. The mobility aspect can support the immediate acceptance and inculcation of engineering change requests into the project specifications.
2. Quotation errors
In any business, the bottom line is the goal, and for this to happen you must start at the beginning—the quotation. Without the right quote, with the correct costing, you either don’t make a profit, because you have not included all the elements, or lose the client due to high cost. Sales personnel need access to details, so they can get the right estimate and quote to their customers.
3. Planning hiccups
The essence of planning is plotting out the project’s timelines that begin with start and end dates. Industrial equipment manufacturers leverage the 'Critical Path Method' to come up with this timeline. Visualization helps compare the actual progress of the project in comparison to the timeline, giving you an indication of the areas in which there could be potential delays. What you need is a solution that offers visual capabilities to schedule resources and materials as per the various milestones to flow without hassles. This can ensure that manufacturing is on time and service delivery is as per schedule.
4. Logistical confusions
Manufacturing companies have a considerable amount of equipment and materials that need to move from the shop floor to production operations Without the right support, this could lead to a situation that can only be described as a logistical nightmare. You need a solution that helps you plan the capacity of the machine so that the person in charge can assign resources to the machines as required.
5. Resource management
In the planning of the manufacturing process, one of the main problems that project managers tend to face is that of resource management. You need the means to link resources (people and materials) to the project tasks and deal with changes like escalations, interruptions, and absences. Doing so will ensure that the resources are nor wasted neither are they overly strained.
6. Service flow problems
The scope of work for manufacturing companies in most instances may not end with the project assembly or manufacture. It could also involve the transfer of the result of the project to the base, which offers service opportunities like maintenance, repair, and overhaul services. This can pose some service integration issues that can be mitigated with the right support with job creation functionality. With this category of services, a project can be created to ensure that the consumption of service orders (material, resources, expense, etc.) can be posted to the relevant project.
How to get started with addressing these challenges?
There could be many other aspects that an industrial equipment manufacturer would have to consider as they strive to balance profitability with the delivery of quality within timelines.
If you want to understand how you can streamline your manufacturing operations with the help of STAEDEAN Industrial Equipment Manufacturing solution download the factsheet.
Adri Cardol
