Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are considered the brain and heart of manufacturing organizations. Both are essentially needed to carry out business processes smoothly. A business’s PLM and ERP systems must be connected like the human brain and heart to ensure the correct data movement.
But here, the question is when to integrate PLM and ERP in your manufacturing company. This article enlists 6 signs indicating the integration of PLM and ERP for manufacturing Company.
- When Unable to Create Alignment Among Different Departments
It happens when multiple information gaps and misalignments exist among all departments in your manufacturing unit. Now that the design and engineering teams operate only in the PLM system and the manufacturing, logistics, and distribution teams only operate in the ERP platform, management can’t access to product data overview.
Moreover, all teams work in silos with respective systems, impacting your teams’ communication. With siloed data and functions, having all teams on the same page regarding product information won’t be easy.
- When Battling to Keep up with Competition
Competition is an aspect that every industry face and needs to overcome for survival. Your manufacturing company could be in a situation where the competing firms seem to operate better than you, be it via reduced production costs, higher profit margins, or satisfied customers.
But how can your company get to this point? There is a good chance that competing manufacturing companies have integrated their PLM and ERP systems to operate smoothly.
- Your Company has a Low First Pass Yield
Does your manufacturing unit have a higher percentage of products requiring rework or corrective adjustments for the tested batch? It’s possible that your first pass yield or throughput yield, a KPI demonstrating the manufacturing process’s quality and efficiency, is low.
The reason for defective manufacturing can be an inconsistent overall process, making it less reliable. All this rework might result in longer lead times and poor bottom lines, ultimately impacting your position and reputation in the industry.
- When Supply Chain is Inconsistent
The company’s lack of a well-connected system can develop information gaps to 0 because of manual data entry and maintaining multiple siloed systems. If your manufacturing team forgets to deliver the list of required parts or shares inaccurate lists due to incorrect data entry with the purchasing team, your production process can halt.
This supply shortage can impact your supply chain, and end customers will receive a late delivery. It could also be possible that BOM has been updated from its current version with various iterations because of internal or external factors. And if not communicated on time, this could result in incomplete, incorrect, or outdated product specifications for purchasing team.
- When not having End-to-End Visibility into Your Product Journey
Before reaching the end customer, your product goes through multiple stages, like designing, product engineering, manufacturing engineering and operations, warehousing, and distributing.
However, with disconnected PLM and ERP systems, you may not have a complete view of your product data, such as which stage it is in or the channel to update changes, leading to increased response time quickly.
Furthermore, it will impact your planning around material sourcing, output forecasts, and workforce capacity, costing your products for scraps, rework, or waivers.
- Your Company Incur Repeated Ad-Hoc Costs
With poorly aligned teams and an increased risk of defective production, your costs are bound to increase when fixing processes and products. The faulty products must be corrected and inspected, costing you time and resources. Moreover, you will lose finances in fixing, inspecting, or recalling the product. You will have to waste time by having long conversations with distributors, customers, and legal teams.
Wrapping it all up!
Now that you know the 6 signs necessitating a PLM and ERP integration, you can better decide whether it’s the suitable solution for your manufacturing company. So, connect with your engineering and manufacturing teams for their opinion on a PLM-ERP integration. Once decided, look for PLM and ERP systems.
Remember that an ideal Manufacturing ERP Software will allow you to integrate the system with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The standard integration provided by ERP must be configurable, quick, and easy to use, with no coding hassles.
