What Is Your Manufacturing Process?
As manufacturers navigate the increasingly thorny path of taking control of changing schedules, capacity constraints, and on-demand changes, one mantra should serve as their guiding post: BE CLEAR ON WHO YOU ARE.
All too often, manufacturers closely adhere to what they know, or what their budget and scope caters to, or what they think they do. But regardless of the manufacturing process — make-to-stock (MTS), assemble-to-order (ATO), make-to-order (MTO) or engineer-to-order (ETO) — utilizing production planning within SAP typically provides an enormous surge in visibility, traceability, cost management, and an overall optimization of the supply chain.
Unfortunately, most manufacturing companies continue to rely on outdated legacy systems and non-integrated processes based on a paintbrush-style approach: a few brushstrokes here and a few there. Such processes do not allow a picture of the production and capacity planning cycle to fully emerge, making it increasingly harder to keep pace with rapidly-changing market and customer demands. More and more, it’s important to ask: “How does a growth-oriented manufacturer effectively use the production planning module of SAP to increase operations visibility and information across the supply chain to its fullest possible extent?”
