Electronics Industry ERP: 3 Basic Needs to Consider

One of the first steps in the ERP selection process is the gathering of key business requirements. There are three basic requirements that all businesses in the electronics industry should expect from their ERP system, and they are all financial needs. Your Electronics ERP will have to provide for accounting, sales, and payroll needs.

Electronics ERP Accounting

We all need accounting to answer the important question, “How much money do we want to report?” and the electronics industry is no different. Accounting systems record transactions in units and money. Many of these transactions are generated by business actions such as receiving cash or paying a bill. The transactions go beyond money, for example, issuing a purchase order to a vendor is an accounting transaction. There are internally-generated transactions too, such as accruals and recording depreciation.

If any module could be considered the core of ERP, it is accounting. Some ERP’s started life as stand-alone accounting systems so the basic tool set you need will be there.

Electronics ERP Sales

The electronics industry has sales too. Some sell products to other manufacturers or directly to retailers and some sell services. Some sell both. Those sales need to be recorded. Electronics ERP should track who bought from us, what they bought, when they ordered, when we delivered, and when they paid us. ERP will track where they are, where we produced the order and where the payment comes from. We could also have some why’s and how’s to track, given our particular needs

Many of us in the electronics industry also need to provide quotes for prospective orders. The quote could be a simple reply over the telephone that we do have it in inventory and can deliver a circuit board today. It also could be a significant reply to a formal request for a quotation for a uniquely designed custom product such as the radio and communications for the state police to be delivered next year. Whatever the need, these quotes should come from your electronics ERP, informed by key business metrics.

Electronics ERP Payroll

The third concern we all share is payroll. We want a check ourselves and we are required to pay our employees accurately and on time. Then our government will want to know how much we paid and to whom it was paid for taxes. Most ERP systems will include payroll processing. There are also many outside services that do excellent work processing the payroll. These will require data that can come from the ERP. At a really simple level, payroll only requires the number of hours worked and a payroll rate. But if you want to get the most from your electronics ERP, you will process a lot more data such as job number, operation, time on and off each operation, setup v. run time and many other factors that a typical outside service might not provide.