Are you looking to grow profits for your metals business? Perhaps a better question would be who isn’t trying to grow profits?! Based on our many years of experience helping metal processing companies grow, we understand the importance of being able to accurately measure business metrics and make subsequent improvements in key areas such as forecasting, quoting, production schedules, materials usage, and more.
If you are looking to increase your profits, you’ll want to understand how a modern and affordable ERP solution can connect and streamline your metals business. We actually wrote a book that provides some deeper insight into this.
Download our ebook, New Rules of Metals Operations: How Cloud ERP Delivers Data-driven Insights and Masters Multi-step Processing.
A fully integrated solution works across sales, purchasing, production, inventory management, and fulfillment. This enables you to improve everything from quoting to scheduling and controlling production. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.
Turn Your Data into Profitable Insights
It all starts with data. In order to make business improvements that impact the bottom line, you need to have a benchmark of what is currently happening. Only then can you identify opportunities to tighten up controls, improve accuracy, and impact profits.
Here are a few questions to ask that will help inform your technology choices:
- What data do you have?
- What data do you wish you had?
- How does data flow through your operations?
- Do the right people have visibility to the data needed to perform their jobs with precision?
Your workers make decisions every day that impact customer satisfaction and profits. Whether they are purchasing inventory or scheduling machine operators, they need to have current and comprehensive data at their fingertips.
By using the cloud, you can centralize and secure your data, connect legacy systems and bridge them with newer technologies. This allows you to gain new functionality such as real-time visibility into production including downtime, operator errors, and materials. Other examples include customized views of inventory levels, sales orders, production scheduling, and shipping.
Greater Accuracy Leads to Happier Customers
In the pursuit of higher profits, it’s impossible to ignore the role of customer satisfaction. When you have access to better and more accurate data, you can use that to inform customers, improve the user experience, nurture relationships, anticipate needs, and create upsell opportunities.
Customers demand quick and accurate information. They want to get information quickly about products, services, prices, and timelines. And they don’t want to hear about shortages, delays, or changes, especially after they placed an order.
The best ERP solutions streamline all your business processes including the full customer lifecycle. You can improve customer relations by providing:
- better automation
- efficient customer interactions with access to their sales history
- real-time inventory levels and production schedules
- accurate sales quotes and delivery times
- streamlined shipping operations with predictable deliveries and costs
ERP Automates Data Flow
Whether you are using manual processes, spreadsheets, or an older generic ERP system, chances are you are not taking advantage of the full power of data.
Cloud-based ERP allows you to have more control of the resources needed to complete processing and optimize all inputs (inventory, people, and machines) in order to increase profits.
Tracking materials in the metals industry is complex and basic ERP systems cannot handle dimensional, chemical, and physical attributes nor can they manage a range of processing options. The matrix needed for forecasting, pricing, and scheduling is above the capabilities of a spreadsheet or most ERP packages.
The answer is to use an ERP solution that is designed specifically for the metals industry and can provide the instant and dynamic computations needed in order to compete and thrive in today’s marketplace.
Accuracy Fuels Profits
So exactly how does the right ERP system improve the accuracy of your business? Cloud-based ERP designed for the metals industry will automatically analyze inventory and production requirements in order to optimize all the variables. It does this in the background and includes multi-stage production requirements as well as outsourced processing.
Through automation, our solution will:
- Improve forecasting based on sales history
- Increase the accuracy and profitability of quotes based on resource availability
- Build production schedules as orders are placed
- Record actual production, scrap, sheers, and break weights
- Determine additional cuts and material required due to scrap
- Automatically route jobs through the production process
- Optimize use of resources and allocate appropriate materials at each step of production
Next Steps
Still need convincing on how accuracy boosts your profit? Contact us today or schedule a personal demonstration of RealSTEEL for your business.
