Maximizing profitability in a highly competitive market is only possible with an accurate picture of your costs. For a capital-intensive industry that is characterized by low margins, short product lifecycles, and substantial research and development costs, closely monitoring and controlling costs and margins, and reducing waste in all areas of the business is essential to your on-going profitability. SYSPRO enables you to implement continuous improvement by giving you visibility to costs and profits across the business and helping you to identify issues as they occur. This includes variations in expected and actual raw material and production costs; late supplier deliveries; obsolete, slow-moving and excessive inventories; and product defects and scrap.

A strong driver in this industry is a traceability system, in case of a failure in automotive safety standards. Regulations indicate areas requiring extra focus, but ultimately, the management team need to fully understand their risks and be fully in control of all of their processes all day long. The increasing use of common components in large numbers of products causes recalls to spread across several manufacturers with some problems not becoming apparent until the goods have been sold to the mass market. Traceability is especially challenging because problems can occur at any point along your supply chain, from R&D through materials handling to assembly and shipping. Broken or slow processes can be particularly costly – and even lethal. SYSPRO Traceability offers full visibility throughout the value chain to ensure quality and continued compliance with regulatory requirements. It provides the ability to trace, identify, isolate, report, quarantine and place affected products on hold quickly and with minimum disruption.

SYSPRO provides the tools to help you optimize your inventory investment without sacrificing customer service. It enables you to effectively plan and control diverse and extensive product lines in a single or multi-warehouse environment, facilitating the creation of warehouses and bin locations to represent both physical and virtual stock locations. Whether you employ simple manual methods to manage your warehouse operations, or sophisticated automated methods such as bar-coding and mobile devices, SYSPRO Inventory and Warehouse Management (WMS) systems assist you in optimizing your pick, putaway and cycle count activities. Whether you stock, sell, purchase or manufacture items by unit, weight, volume, pack or container size, SYSPRO’s multiple units of measure per stock item give you the flexibility to accurately record and track stock quantities. Product version control is automated through the Engineering Change Control (ECC) module, while extensive master data enables you to define parameters for transacting in sales, purchasing and manufacturing.

Constant innovation is one of the key factors to remaining competitive, and on-going research and development to design new and better products is integral to the industry. Your ability to design new products and modify existing designs, as well as improve time-to-market is critical to remaining competitive and profitable. SYSPRO’s ECC, Bill of Materials, Work-in-Progress and Factory Documentation modules enable you to implement controls to ensure that your products are manufactured under consistent processes, to the correct designs and specifications. Single-level, multi-level, co and by-product bills are all catered for and flexible bill definitions accommodate complex component and sub-assembly requirements.

Particularly for component and material suppliers of original equipment manufacturers (OEM), synchronizing supply with customer demand is a key requirement to prevent costly line stoppages in assembly plants. This involves not only automating order processing and other processes in the supply chain, but also executing production plans using LEAN principles. Streamlined electronic collaboration with your OEM customers is facilitated through features such as SYSPRO Workflow Services, Document Flow Manager, SYSPRO e.net Solutions, EDI, Office Automation and Messaging, email and various Business-to-Business import and export functions, thus reducing response time, margin for error and penalties associated with disruption to OEM production lines.

Enable greater visibility, compliance and quality control in the procurement and supplier selection process Request for Quote Suppliers can respond directly to RFQs online Supply Chain Portal Enables joint decision-making on suppliers and automatic selection of approved suppliers Preferred Suppliers Allows you to capture and maintain predetermined sourcing policies to facilitate the selection of recommended and pre-approved suppliers during the purchasing cycle.