In custom-build, as well as project and service environments, job cost accuracy is essential in attaining correct pricing and profitability, as well as to assess the reliability of the quoting process, while in standard costing environments, it is essential for tracking the validity of current standard costs.

For custom-build environments, SYSPRO's Quotations module enables detailed estimates based on all aspects of the job (or jobs) and the automatic creation of jobs, purchase orders and sales orders based on approved quotes. This ensures the integrity of the quoted and margin information throughout the system. For project and service environments, this same functionality is available, with the added benefits of hierarchical analysis of costs and margins per head and section.

SYSPRO's fully integrated solution enables the capture, tracking and analyzing of job and product costs, and profitability in real-time. Details of expected versus actual costs for material and scrap, internal and external labor, fixed and overhead costs per job, or group of jobs, is available through SYSPRO's querying and reporting features. This enables the identification of exceptions and problems as they occur, such as areas of high cost expenditure, production scrap and rework, and problems in the quoting process. Furthermore, for those businesses wishing to take advantage of government and private enterprise grant programs, detailed R&D job data is easily extracted for regulatory reporting requirements.

With SYSPRO's visibility to product cost details and profit margins, including for co- and by-products, you can evaluate job cost performance, margin analysis and pricing with confidence.

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.

SYSPRO's Inventory module enables the definition of multiple user-defined units of measure (UOM) for stocked items: Stocking UOM, Alternate UOM, Other UOM and Manufacturing UOM. These units of measure, along with their conversion factors, are used in various parts of the system to ensure accurate quantities for sales, purchasing and production.

For production purposes, SYSPRO's multi-level bill of materials functionality enables you to define the manufacturing recipes and methods for bulk, intermediary and pack items, allowing for up to 15 levels per route, and 10 routes per finished product. For each level in a multi-level bill, you can define ingredient quantities as quantity per, fixed quantity or wet weight percentage in relation to the UOM defined for that level's parent item and routing.

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.

Critical to continuous improvement strategies is the reduction of overall product lead time to enable companies to be more agile and responsive to unpredictable and changing customer demands. Identifying and reducing the number and severity of manufacturing bottlenecks is crucial to any lead time reduction strategy. SYSPRO's Work in Progress module provides tracking of expected versus actual operation times, assisting you in identifying bottleneck patterns and inaccurate demonstrated capacity estimates.

Where nothing can be done to remove short-term bottlenecks, management of production schedules to take account of them is critical to optimizing your production resources and providing realistic order delivery dates. SYSPRO Factory Scheduling provides one-click highlighting of bottleneck operations on existing schedules, as well as what-if scheduling and sequencing to optimize utilization of available production resources.

Particularly for component and material suppliers of original equipment manufacturers (OEM) synchronizing supply with customer demand is a key requirement to prevent costly line stoppages in assembly plants. This involves not only automating order processing and other processes in the supply chain, but also executing production plans using LEAN principles.

SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders and Releases provides you with the tools to record contracts with your OEM customers and provides you with an accurate means of tracking and reconciling cumulative release quantities and converting them into sales order quantities. SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders enable SYSPRO customers to easily update call-off schedules for their OEM clients, as well as reconcile the cumulative position against their OEM contracts.

Confirmed customer schedules, in turn, become an input for demand planning and ultimately, production and purchasing requirements linked to the relevant schedule requirement dates. SYSPRO's Requirements Planning and Factory Scheduling provide you with the tools to implement LEAN principles, manage the replenishment process and ensure that you meet your OEM contract service levels.

Streamlined electronic collaboration with your OEM customers is facilitated through features such as Document Flow Manager, SYSPRO e.net solutions, EDI, Office Automation and Messaging, fax, email and various Business-to-Business import and export functions, thus reducing response time, margin for error and penalties associated with disruption to OEM production lines.

To identify and reduce waste and inefficiencies in the production process, you need real-time access to accurate material and labor flow data. SYSPRO enables you to easily query the status of your work-in-progress in terms of costs, material and scrap quantities, labor hours and manufactured quantities. In addition, optional lot traceability and serial tracking functionality enables you to identify the jobs to which traceable raw materials have been issued.

In SYSPRO, the material and labor allocations are created manually for a non-standard job, or automatically for a job created from a bill of material or estimate. In all cases, you can specify whether the materials are required a certain number of days before the job finish date, or at the start of a specific operation. This provides complete visibility to the material and labor that is required for any particular job, and when it is required in the production process. Also, once a job is in progress, you can easily pinpoint where the job is currently located in the routing, as well as what material has been issued so far, and the job's overall progress.

Trial-kitting mechanisms provide complete visibility to the availability of materials required for jobs. Flexible posting functionality enables you to issue materials and labor to jobs at any time via a number of methods, including specific and kit issues. In addition, SYSPRO e.net Solutions and Job Import functionality enable seamless integration of shop floor data collection systems.

Powerful queries and reports provide detailed information on job status and delivery performance information.