Whether you’re getting started as a business or moving to a new system, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will be vital to your success as a building materials manufacturer.
Get it right, and it could set you up for success.
Finding the right solution for your business requires you to ask all the right questions, acquire the most pertinent information, and then make an informed decision. Here are the ERP-related questions you should be asking as a building material manufacturer:
Is the ERP System Customized for Building Material Manufacturers?
ERPs are used in many different industries, including everything from manufacturing to retail and healthcare. They can all be adapted to suit specific requirements, so check whether your needs will be met.
What sort of third-party applications will it include? Can you integrate all aspects of your business? Are you using tools actually made for building material manufacturers or trying to force an adaptation?
Here are some of the areas you should focus on:
- Will it accommodate the acquisition and inventory management process, accounting for extra cuts and materials taken from scraps?
- Can the software calculate the costs of labor and freight while allowing for additional surcharges and extraneous costs?
- Will it allow you to create custom jobs and track the manufacturing process from acquisition through to production and shipping?
Does the ERP System Have Everything Your Business Needs?
The whole point of an ERP system is that it integrates all aspects of your business and provides a single source of truth for every department.
You’re no longer forced to adapt various third-party applications and tools, tracking the same data across numerous outputs and getting confused as a result. Data is sent to the same place and can be accessed by everyone.
A suitable ERP software solution, therefore, is one that accommodates all aspects of your business:
- Inventory Management: You should be able to track the materials when they arrive and monitor them when they are stored. It will simplify the production process, prevent over- and under-stocking, and allow for easier maintenance by considering the current state of each item.
- Sales and Accounting: ERP uses machine learning to track the company’s key processes and AI to automate them. It should provide options such as automatic sales orders and invoicing while keeping track of every completed and ongoing order and re-stocking when supplies run low.
- Production: Manufacturing is the heart of your business, so look for components that track materials through every step of the production process and allow you to make changes and spot potential issues in real-time. If there is a hold-up, you need to know about it and rectify it instantly.
How Much Will it Cost, and What Ongoing Support is Provided?
You can expect to pay anywhere from $10,000 to more than $1 million for a comprehensive and fully customized ERP solution.
The exact cost will depend on your needs and business size, as well as the number of integrations you need and the overall complexity of the system.
The good news is that the cost largely depends on revenue. If you run a relatively small operation with only a handful of employees, you don’t need to worry about spending 6 figures on the latest solutions with all the technological trimmings.
It should also be scalable, so if you’re in a transition period, the work you do now won’t be undone in the future, and you can simply integrate more tools as your business grows.
Don’t waste time and money on tools that you may need in the future. Consider only what you need right now, and work with a company that can meet those needs. If there is a period of extreme growth in your near future, you can quickly expand.
Will it Make You More Efficient and Productive?
The ERP system is not just there to look pretty. It’s there to do a job, many of them, in fact, and the end goal is to boost efficiency and productivity. If it can do that, it will start paying for itself very quickly, and your business will only go in one direction from there.
Everything begins with the sales quoting and ordering process. Hastening this process can save countless hours of needless manual invoicing and checking. From there, inventory management software will reduce stocking fees from overstocking and production delays from understocking while negating all of those manual inventory checks.
Finally, by upgrading the production and customer relationship management process, orders will be completed sooner, clients will be happy, and you’ll have the means to easily communicate with them and encourage further orders.
Consider the integrations, check the optional extras, and build a system that can increase your bottom line.
How Quickly Will You Outgrow the Tools Provided, and Where Do You Go From There?
Just because you can expand operations as you scale doesn’t mean you should ignore the current capabilities of those tools.
This industry moves very quickly—what’s innovative today could be obsolete tomorrow.
Check that you’re getting tools that are fully updated and meet all of your current needs. You don’t want to be paying top dollar for outdated tech that you’ll need to update as soon as you experience any kind of forward momentum.
At RealSTEEL™, for instance, we work only with the latest cutting-edge technology and provide updates and support to assist our customers now and in the future. Our ERP is state-of-the-art and comes with a full range of support and development, including the ability to add various departments and companies, use multiple currencies, and integrate several languages.
Conclusion: Get Started with Your Building Material Manufacturing ERP Today
Ready to take your ERP to the next level? Request a demo of our customizable ERP systems. We can help you build and implement a system that will meet your requirements across every aspect of your business, boosting efficiency and facilitating rapid and substantial growth.
We’re specialists in supplying building materials manufacturing, and have assisted innumerable organizations. So, check our software features to see what we have to offer, and get in touch to start the process.nited States.
