Streamline Your Purchasing: How Fraction ERP Saves Your Manufacturing Business Hours
For small to medium-sized manufacturing businesses, efficiency isn’t just a goal; it’s a necessity for survival and growth. The purchasing process, in particular, can be a major time sink if managed manually through spreadsheets and email. Every hour spent chasing orders, correcting errors, or re-entering data is an hour lost on core manufacturing activities.
Fraction ERP, a robust, cloud-based system designed by engineers for engineers, transforms this bottleneck into a streamlined, automated workflow. By integrating all aspects of your value stream, Fraction ERP provides powerful, accessible tools that significantly reduce the administrative burden of purchase order management.
Here are four key time-saving features within Fraction ERP that help manufacturers reclaim valuable time and improve control.
1. Automated “Request for Quotation” (RFQ) Process
Finding the best price and lead time from multiple suppliers can be a laborious, back-and-forth email process. Fraction ERP simplifies this with an integrated Request for Quotation (RFQ) feature.
Instead of manually drafting emails to several vendors and tracking responses in a spreadsheet, you can generate an RFQ directly within the system. The platform allows you to select multiple potential suppliers for the required items and send out the request with a single click. When suppliers respond, all the information is captured centrally in the system, allowing for an easy side-by-side comparison. This accelerates the decision-making process, ensuring you secure the best terms quickly without endless email threads.
2. Bulk Ordering Directly from the MRP Screen
The Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) screen is the heart of production planning in Fraction ERP. It provides a real-time view of demand driven by sales orders and current stock levels. Manually translating this demand into individual purchase orders is incredibly time-consuming.
Fraction ERP eliminates this pain point. The MRP screen not only highlights what you need to buy but also allows you to bulk order from the MRP screen with just a few clicks. The system semi-automatically generates a consolidated list of required purchases. You simply review and select the items, and the system drafts the necessary purchase orders, saving hours of manual calculation and data entry.
3. Consolidating Demand into Fewer Purchase Orders
A common inefficiency in manual systems is the creation of numerous, small, and fragmented purchase orders for the same supplier. This leads to administrative clutter and increases the complexity of goods receipt and accounts payable processes.
Fraction ERP intelligently addresses this by consolidating demand into fewer purchase orders. The system is designed to group items needed from the same supplier onto a single purchase order where possible. This simplifies communication with your vendors, streamlines deliveries, and significantly reduces the volume of paperwork (or digital paperwork) that your team has to manage, improving efficiency across the supply chain.
4. Emailing Purchase Orders Directly from Fraction ERP
The final step in the process—sending the actual purchase order to the supplier—can also be a source of friction. The traditional method involves saving a PDF, opening an email client, attaching the document, and manually typing the recipient’s details.
With Fraction ERP, you can email purchase orders directly from the system itself. Once an order is approved, a single click generates a professional, branded PDF and opens a pre-addressed email within the platform’s interface. This creates a seamless, trackable communication log for every single order, ensuring all team members have visibility over what was sent and when, without having to check individual email inboxes.
Reclaim Your Time
By leveraging these integrated features, manufacturing businesses can move away from reactive, manual purchasing processes and adopt a streamlined, proactive approach. Fraction ERP provides the control, visibility, and automation needed to manage purchasing efficiently, saving valuable management time that can be reinvested into growing your business.
To see these time-saving features in action and learn how Fraction ERP can transform your manufacturing operations, contact us today for a free online demo or visit the Fraction ERP blog for more insights.