How to Select the Best Process Manufacturing ERP for Your Business

It may have seemed like a simple quest. Open any trade magazine. If you are a food processor, there will be several ads declaring they have the right process manufacturing ERP software for your business. Pharma manufacturer? Same thing, open your trade sheet and your ideal system will be there. By now, you have hopefully realized that things are not that simple.

There is a good chance you will end up with one of the advertised systems in your sector but *after completing a thorough ERP requirements analysis, you will have confidence in this selection.

Assigning Priorities

From your requirements analysis, start by assigning priorities for each of your business needs. If you make a commodity such as an agricultural fertilizer or baking flour, lowest cost production may be one of your primary needs. From this analysis, you may look for an ERP that will help you operate equipment for long-running batches of production.

Recommended Reading: 7 Steps to Selecting Process Manufacturing ERP

Another business such as gasoline production might have very tightly controlled formulations. Therefore, they may look for an ERP that includes the ability to communicate directly with the production equipment and monitor and adjust the processes with little or no human decision making.

Maybe your ingredients vary with available prices anywhere in the world. Wheat from Russia might be cheaper than wheat from Australia today but it requires a slightly different recipe and milling cycle. In this case, a top priority for your business may be an ERP which can accommodate material variations either through automated production scheduling or rapid product development.

follow the process of analysing industry conditions, identifying the ways in which these conditions affect your business and prioritizing requirements for your new ERP system

All these examples follow the process of analysing industry conditions, identifying the ways in which these conditions affect your business and prioritizing requirements for your new ERP system based on these facts.

A Repeatable Process

Repeat this process for each aspect of your business and you will be able to develop a complete picture of your current processes and business goals. These will be crucial when completing the ERP selection process whether it is shortlisting vendors, developing an ERP RFP document or conducting ERP demonstration sessions.

Your process manufacturing ERP selection journey will almost inevitably lead you back to those same systems which clutter your trade magazines with adverts. But your requirements analysis will also open up the possibility of implementing industry-independent systems which may have been discarded on account of their lack of “process” branding. You may just find that these highly configurable systems are exactly what your business needs.