Improving on time delivery with Fraction ERP
Improving on time delivery is a focus of every business owner and manager. It is a key metric that can drive a range of positive behaviours. You can't have a sustainably high on time delivery levels without good quality, efficient processes, an effective schedule or a well trained team. On time delivery catches a lot of management activities and provides a nice summary of where you are.
Of course, if you can deliver a consistent high level on time delivery performance then you are likely to be seen as a reliable supplier. Whilst this doesn't sound very sexy, reliably suppliers often find themselves hoovering up additional contracts.
If you can deliver on time without the need for blood, sweat and tears then you are on the right track for maximising your profit margins. So, there is a lot to be said for focusing on on time delivery.
This is also a key focus for us here at Fraction ERP. In this article we are going to share with you some ideas on how you can improve your delivery performance and give you some idea as to how Fraction ERP can help you on your journey.
Giles and Patrick's backgrounds
Before we go any further I want to give you a quick insight into the core team here at Fraction. We aren't just software guys who happen to decide that making an ERP system was going to be fun thing to do. Giles is a manufacturing engineer, deploying and specialising in ERP is something that happened whilst he was running factory operations. Junzi is an aerospace scientist who became a coding superstar. Patrick is also a hands on engineer and uses Fraction day in and day out in his manufacturing business.
Fraction ERP is a system that has been built based on real life experience.
New feature in Fraction ERP
So, to push the on time delivery agenda we have just added new tiles to our reporting dashboard.
The on time delivery tiles allow you to review your month to date and year to date delivery performance. You can review individual customers and alter the date ranges.
This is a really good way to keep your finger on the pulse of your manufacturing business. The delivery scores are calculated automatically based on the shipment dates versus the contract dates.
You can learn more by viewing the short video below.
What can you do to improve on time delivery?
There are practical actions you can take to improve on time delivery. Here we will share with you a few key actions and how Fraction ERP has been designed to support this challenge.
1. Capacity planning
Getting a realistic grip on your capacity when loading your business is critical. Not being aware of exactly how busy you are at certain times is a recipe for disaster. Most businesses will overload their teams and find it difficult to catch up. This ongoing stress in the business really doesn't help to achieve a steady, high, on time delivery performance.
In Fraction ERP we have deployed the visual scheduler and capacity planning screens. The visual scheduler also provides a capacity snapshot of your workcentres before you commit your operations.
2. Sales order processing lead time
The more time it takes to get your orders through the office and onto the shop floor, the less time you have available in production. Ensuring that your order handling processes are as slick and as short as possible are key here.
At Fraction we have worked hard to ensure that you have to input the least amount of information to process your orders. From converting your quotes into sales orders, through to generating works orders and scheduling their operations, through to purchasing the required materials.
3. Move to exception reporting
If you have to track everything in your factory manually, you won't have time to focus on other management tasks and improving your operation. Exception reporting is the ability to know the few things that need to be dealt with and (effectively) ignoring anything else.
Giles and Patrick have both spent enough time walking around factories to know that there can be better uses of time. When we developed the production tracking screen in Fraction ERP, we were keen to help Production Managers know exactly what they need to focus on. Late operations are just a click away from the dashboard, and combining the two approaches together is a great way to keep on top of the progress of your production orders.
4. Don't run out of stock
This speaks for itself; you can't produce if you don't have materials to work on. Keeping on top of your inventory levels is a good practice and moving to perpetual inventory counting is an excellent strategy.
Within Fraction ERP we have a simple stock updating function that can allow for perpetual inventory counting. We also have a simple to use stock alerts function, that can tell you when specified items are running low.
5. Use a sunrise meeting
A sunrise meeting is a short daily team meeting that focuses on all of the key processes that make your manufacturing operation tick. Did purchasing buy everything they had to yesterday? Did everything ship yesterday on time? Did all orders start on time? Have our suppliers delivered on time? You get the idea.
Keeping it short is key to making it effective and having data at your finger tips is essential. We built the Fraction ERP dashboard to put this information right where you need it. You can use the dashboard to orchestrate your sunrise meeting, with each team member being responsible for sections of the dashboard. Get them to understand what the exceptions are and what the corrective action is before the meeting and 'hey presto!' you have an effective meeting structure
I hope you see that Fraction is built by people who understand the day to day pressures of running a factory. If you'd like to find out more about Fraction ERP and how it can help your business to deliver on time then please get in touch using the form below.
We offer a free online demo so you can get a feel for us and the software. If you like what you see in the demo then you can take advantage of our free fourteen day trial, to see if it will work well for your business.