From enabling the identification and tracking of non-value adding activities inherent in your current operational processes, to the automation of manual processes, SYSPRO's powerful functionality provides you with the tools to implement your LEAN initiatives. Its integrated nature and ease-of-use facilitates the effortless extraction of financial and operational information required for Value Stream Mapping (VSM).

SYSPRO's Inventory module is a synchronized hub providing a consolidated view of all stock locations and those activities that impact inventory optimization and customer service levels, as well as the end-to-end elements of costs and lead times. Features such as Pareto and obsolescence analysis can assist in identifying those products that are suitable for VSM focus, while SYSPRO modules such as Engineering Change Control, Bills of Material, Work-in Progress and Factory Scheduling facilitate the evaluation of targets for kaizen programs, such as reduction in design and manufacturing costs, cycle times, queues and setups.

SYSPRO's powerful inspection, serial tracking and lot traceability functionality aid in the identification and tracking of the source of defects, thereby enabling the implementation of kaizen initiatives towards the principle of 'Quality at the source'.

The queries and reports in Work in Progress enable you to quickly assess the statuses, inventories and costs associated with work in progress, and provide metrics on utilization, efficiency, scrap and rework, while customer and supplier delivery performance metrics are provided by the Sales Order and Purchase Order and Inventory Optimization modules.

SYSPRO's Inventory and Bills of Material modules enable the modelling of the LEAN techniques of batch size and setup reduction on costs, lead time and inventory. SYSPRO's Factory Scheduling provides graphical tools to assist you in optimizing scheduling and sequencing processes, to reduce setup and overall lead time, and improve manufacturing flexibility and sale-to-customer flow. This, along with the inventory optimization and production planning features, enables you to refine the pace of production to match the pace of sales. Furthermore, features such as sales order/job/purchase-order linking facilitate the electronic implementation of true pull supply- chain processes where appropriate.

Document Flow Manager and SYSPRO e.net Solutions enable you, not only to automate resource and time-intensive processes such as order processing, but also to handle increased volumes from global customers. By providing the capability for 24/7 order taking and acknowledgment, they improve lead time, and free up staff to perform other value-adding tasks. Furthermore, SYSPRO's XML-aware solutions enable version-independent integration with best-of-breed shop floor monitoring and control systems.

The system's sophisticated reporting and analytics tools enable user-defined reports and queries, while SYSPRO Workflow Services enable the creation of efficient workflows to implement business rules and standardize business processes. Electronic Signatures and automation tools enable the automatic raising of alerts, triggers and events based on user-defined criteria, thereby aiding prompt problem solving and process improvement.

SYSPRO's flexible integrated features and best-practice focus give you single-point visibility and control, providing support for the implementation of your LEAN initiatives.

Keeping inventory levels and obsolescence to a minimum, while continuing to offer superior customer service, entails achieving the right product mix, as well as the continual balancing of supply and demand. Understanding and tracking the relevant measures of risk which impact the balance is critical for reducing stocks, improving availability and increasing turnover.

Through the powerful tools in the Inventory Optimization suite of modules, SYSPRO enables you to better understand and quantify your risk profile, thereby assisting you to reduce your safety stocks and free up working capital, without compromising your reputation as a reliable supplier in the market place. Key elements that drive inventory across the supply chain are coordinated, tracked and controlled to optimize inventory. Standard analysis of slow-moving, excess, active and static stocks enables targeted promotional and product rationalization programs, as well as accurate obsolescence provisioning. Further benefits include improved warehouse utilization and fewer headaches for the procurement and production scheduling teams.

The Families and Groupings and Forecasting modules enable you to minimize forecast error and manage seasonality, thereby improving order fulfilment performance. This functionality is complemented by features such as available-to-promise and various time fence indicators, which give sales and production staff a reliable view of what they can promise to customers and when.

SYSPRO's material requirements planning gives you clear visibility to the integrated effect of current and future supply and demand, thereby enabling you to make better purchasing and production decisions and reduce excess and obsolete inventories. The inclusion of sources of supply and demand is configurable and various reports and related review programs enable easy identification of potential oversupplies and seamless execution of suggested actions. Order policies by stock code at warehouse level enable you to implement lot-sizing rules for purchased and manufactured items. Standard reports such as the Inventory Exception and the MRP Potential Oversupplies reports help you identify excess inventories and possible problems with your lot-sizing techniques.

SYSPRO's Quality Management System (QMS) enables product quality control by allowing the configuration of multiple measurement metrics, as well as inspection points per inventory item, such as length, chemical composition and hardness. This configuration, which includes the allowable tolerances for each metric and inspection frequency, is configurable as required; for example, full, partial, periodic and random quantity sampling is supported.

Exceptions to inspection rules are configurable per customer, supplier, operation and work center with quality inspection points at Work in Progress Inspection, Purchase Order Receipting, Sales Order Inspection and Inventory Inspection. These quality control checkpoints allow the collection of actual physical product data, to facilitate statistical process control, as well as provide an opportunity for simple material review in the event of a non-conformance, with the possible outcome of inventory reclassification or scrapping. Logs of all quality checks performed are held, including the details of the operators performing the check.

The advanced functionality provides the ability to escalate a quality issue or force quality actions to route into a material review board. The review board then has the facility to sanction the inventory action, such as approval or scrapping, and to record the relevant session details. Additional employee certification requirements for each product by checkpoint and operation are configurable and during all quality-related operations and reviews, this certification is recorded and used to determine if the operation at hand may continue.

Where a full QMS system is not required, quality checks may be implemented using the standard inspection facilities in the Work in Progress and Purchase Order modules. Purchased items can be flagged as requiring inspection so that during receipting, detailed records of counts, inspection, scrap, rejects and returns are recorded. Units in inspection are visible, but unavailable for use until accepted into stock. Similarly, SYSPRO's Work in Progress inspection gives you the tools to inspect manufactured product quality and, depending on the results, select to receipt, scrap or rework quantities.

SYSPRO's Forecasting module gives you the tools to help you forecast future demand, based on seasonal, cyclical and trend demand patterns in your sales history and lost-sales data, thereby enabling you to plan your production and purchasing to meet these requirements.

A powerful Pareto analysis feature enables you to easily identify fast, slow and obsolete items in terms of sales value, gross profit, cost of sales, quantities sold or hits, so you can make decisions about which items to forecast, and the best method to use for each.
You can choose to create forecasts at stock code/warehouse level, and if the Families and Grouping module is installed, you can aggregate your forecasts into user-defined groupings. A variety of forecast calculation methods are available, including the competition method, and the module also provides facilities to track the forecast quality.

Additionally, you can select to manually forecast items which require market intelligence, while selecting to batch forecast all other items, and filters and adjustments can be applied to sales history to account for outliers and other abnormalities.

Multi-level analysis of product performance is available, including at stock code, warehouse, product class, supplier, planner and buyer levels, as well as at user-defined group level if the Families and Groupings module is installed.

The approved forecast becomes the demand input to SYSPRO's Material Requirements Planning system. This gives your planners and buyers visibility to the resources and actions required to meet the demand in the short, medium and long term.

Your ability to harness e-Commerce technologies effectively has enormous potential to transform your business and enhance commercial success and growth.

Your customers and suppliers may look increasingly to closer collaboration, to cut production timetables and minimize disruption to their supply chain. This could involve working via their electronic order and supply chain systems to enable streamlining of operations and to reduce margin for error. Multi-organization research and design teams may need to work collaboratively and to achieve this, you must have efficient, secure systems that can deliver and receive information.

SYSPRO facilitates streamlined, secure electronic data interchange and collaborative commerce through features such Document Flow Manager, e.net Solutions, EDI, Office Automation and Messaging, SYSPRO Workflow Services and various Business-to-Business purchase and sales import and export functions. In addition, SYSPRO's Web Applications are out-the-box solutions which you can run on the Internet/Intranet and easily customize to suit end-user requirements.

Quick response times and accuracy in fulfilling orders are critical to your reputation in a diverse and demanding global market. Automated 24/7 customer order placement and acknowledgment is facilitated via SYSPRO's Document Flow Manager and email. In addition, SYSPRO's e.net Solutions enables the rapid development of applications for mobile devices, so that your sales force can check stock and place orders directly into SYSPRO while out visiting customers, thereby improving order turnaround time.

SYSPRO's e.net Solutions can be extended to integrate SYSPRO with other applications, such as shipping companies' tracking systems to determine the shipping status of customer orders. In addition, e.net Solutions facilitates the integration of SYSPRO with scanning and Smart technologies, thereby streamlining picking and packing processes, as well as inventory stock takes.

If your customers include Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) you can import and easily reconcile vendor EDI releases using SYSPRO's Blanket Sales Order module.

Constant innovation is a key factor to remaining competitive, and on-going research and development into new and better products is integral to the industry. Short product life cycles mean the speed with which you deliver these innovations to the market is imperative to remaining competitive and profitable. SYSPRO's integrated nature and powerful functionality enable you to streamline and track the changes to product designs and costings, as well as to improve the delivery of customer-driven product designs and configurations.

The rules-based Product Configurator enables non-technical staff to rapidly generate accurate product specifications for highly customizable products, thereby helping to reduce lead times and improve the speed and accuracy of order processing in configure-to-order environments. It facilitates the automatic generation of factory orders and purchase orders, with all the relevant detail such as materials and operations required to make or assemble the correct customer-specific configuration of the product. It mitigates the need for manual input or additional bills of materials to cover all product permutations and drastically reduces the margin for input errors. New permutations may be saved for future orders, making it easy to recall at order entry time.

For complete engineer- and design-to-order requirements, SYSPRO speeds the processing of product inquiries through its estimating and quotations functionality, with estimating providing an accurate view of both standard and non-standard material and labor costs, ensuring accurate profitability projection and quoting.

SYSPRO's e.net Solutions, multimedia and import facilities enable the rapid incorporation and processing of customer design data, such as drawings and CAD specifications, further improving turnaround time. Furthermore, SYSPRO's powerful factory scheduling features enable you to quote accurate lead times and delivery dates, based on capacity and existing loads. Once a quote is accepted by the customer, the conversion to a factory order is a simple automated process. SYSPRO's Engineering Change Control (ECC) enables you to apply strict control and uniformity over your design-to-market processes by providing an integrated rules-based electronic workflow system with full version control, security and auditable history. ECC gives you the tools to record and track product design and process changes, assess the impact of these changes on costs and associated data, and control the change routing and approval processes.

SYSPRO provides an integrated view of the development-to-market processes, thus facilitating improved communication between all participants.

The standard of service that you provide your customers makes all the difference in building solid relationships and gaining the competitive edge. This requires keeping track, not only of customer sales-related information, but also details of internal or external business relationships. To make better business decisions about expected customer, product and market activity, you need to have information in appropriate formats and at different levels of detail to carry out analysis.

SYSPRO's Contact Management allows for multiple contacts to be assigned to organizations and individuals that you deal with. These can include your customers and suppliers, as well as entities such as charities and government departments. You can group contacts for related entities and record details regarding interactions such as phone calls, emails and visits against the contact. Integration with Microsoft Outlook allows email correspondence to be sent and updated as an activity within the Contact Management system.

Your ability to deliver quality products faster, with more customer-specific features, and at stable or even reduced prices differentiates you in a discerning market place. Features such as available-to-promise and customer delivery performance reporting, provide information to help you improve your customer service levels, and the Customer/Stock Code Interchange function gives you the flexibility to allow your customers to order by their part number.

SYSPRO enables you to keep a history not only of sales data but also individual customer-related product activities, so you can easily identify buying patterns and preferences, and quickly create repeat orders by copying and amending previous ones. SYSPRO Forecasting uses sales history to identify trends and seasonal components of demand, thereby assisting you in calculating more accurate forecasts, which in turn leads to better planning and improved customer service levels.

Simple, extended and contract pricing mechanisms give you flexibility to apply one-dimensional pricing and discounting, or tailor these requirements to individual customers. Where customers are large organizations"”such as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) or retails chains"”with whom prices are negotiated on a contract or volume basis, more complex pricing is required. SYSPRO's pricing, trade management and sales analysis facilities enable you to provide acceptable pricing terms and delivery targets to large customers without sacrificing profitability.

To gain the competitive edge, you must have the agility to respond to market demands at all levels of operation, without increasing costs and waste, and sacrificing efficiency. Whether you use line, batch or project processes, your scheduling activities must balance competing objectives. This includes the efficient management and execution of re-scheduling activities when business priorities and plans change or unexpected events occur.

Having the capability to create and execute an achievable schedule requires a comprehensive view of the current situation and available resources, as well as the tools to perform efficient re-scheduling if necessary. SYSPRO's visual scheduling products provide this capability to suit all levels of sophistication and complexity, from basic manual drag and drop, to automatic algorithm-driven scheduling and changeover optimization.

Particularly suited to job shop, batch process and project environments, SYSPRO Factory Scheduling provides the planner with an interactive decision support tool that helps balance demand and resource availability. Optimization is enhanced through the consideration of priorities, constraints, and conflicts, as well as sequencing and synchronization requirements. Automatic forward, backward and bi-directional scheduling is available, along with manual intervention. The customizable graphical interface enables quick and easy identification of schedule loads, job and operation statuses and links, and resource availability.

One-click schedule performance metrics, as well as the ability to run, save and compare schedules, provide what-if capability and enable the scheduler to choose the best option for the current circumstances.

Whether you operate a simple scheduling environment requiring single-constraint finite scheduling, or a complex environment requiring multi-constraint and rules-based finite scheduling, SYSPRO can help you optimize your scheduling activities with its Graphical Planning Board (GPB), Factory Scheduler (FS) or Advanced Scheduler (AS).

The necessity to hold diverse inventories to meet customer-driven product variants means that the strict management of raw material lead times is vitally important in maintaining customer service level targets and controlling overall procurement and holding costs. SYSPRO enables you to monitor quoted purchasing lead times against actual supplier delivery performance and to flag reliable suppliers of specific raw materials as certified in the system, as well as to track blanket purchase order contracts. Component-to-operation linking and component offsets facilitate the time-phased calculation of material requirements as well as the implementation of JIT and LEAN purchasing principles. In addition, inventory order point indicators, such as reorder point and minimum/maximum levels provide the tools to help you mitigate problems associated with unreliable supply of long-lead time items, while material requirements planning enables the calculation of material requirements based on forecasts. In addition, SYSPRO's event management enables the automation of notifications to the relevant people when stocks fall below reorder point levels.

In order to maintain appropriate inventory levels in a distributed warehouse environment, you must be able to plan, distribute, monitor and control inventory moving across your internal supply chain.

The SYSPRO Goods in Transit system provides the facilities to create, manage and monitor transfers between multiple warehouses and provides complete visibility to the status and details of in-transit transactions. It gives you the tools to easily create and receipt stock transfers for each warehouse, capture transfer costs, identify and adjust exceptions as they arise and to reconcile transfers sent and received in terms of cost and quantity. The system provides a detailed financial sub-ledger and enables easy reconciliation to SYSPRO's General Ledger.

Used in conjunction with the SYSPRO Sales Order module, the Goods-in-Transit system provides functionality to record back orders in the system for multiple warehouses and to electronically produce accompanying paperwork. Additionally, via the Material Requirements Planning module, SYSPRO's goods-in-transit functionality extends to include distribution requirements planning, thereby enabling plan production and purchasing to meet current and future distributed warehouse requirements. Order policies at stock code warehouse level accommodate different lot-sizing techniques per warehouse.

A built-in workflow engine - SYSPRO Workflow Services (SWS) - enables you to streamline end-to-end business process activities within SYSPRO, as well as to create efficient interactions between SYSPRO and external touch points. Built on the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation, SWS enables you to apply rules-based control over business processes, thereby promoting process cohesion, as well as collaboration among process role-players.

SYSPRO Enterprise Analysis and Modeling is a powerful on-line toolset that enables the alignment of the SYSPRO ERP system with your organizational realities, from the highest strategic levels through to the step-by-step procedures and detail configurations. Besides reducing the time to delivery by ensuring seamless handover at different stages of a SYSPRO implementation, our process modeling provides a smooth system transition when roles or processes change as a result of normal business evolution.