How Can I Improve My Manufacturing Organization Without Spending a Lot of Money?

Four Insightful Tips for Long-term Business Success

The Lake Companies has worked with manufacturers across the globe for nearly four decades. There is a common thread, the best manufacturers are leveraging to save money, see process improvements, and find hidden value in their existing assets.

If you are asking yourself, “How can I improve my manufacturing organization without spending a lot of Here are our four tips for making improvements to your business without spending millions:

General accounting software, like QuickBooks and spreadsheets, are great tools for many startups. However, as your business grows and becomes more complex, methods that help your organization uncover new opportunities and quickly adapt, will increase the bottom line. Time and time again, we see non-integrated spreadsheets work their way into all aspects of business and be used to replace standard ERP capabilities from financial statements to shipping schedules to manufacturing dispatch lists and more. As needs grow, spreadsheets create room for massive errors and excessive inefficiencies. Forward-moving manufacturers need actionable information integrated into their ERP system and can transcend the entire organization so executives, managers, back office, and shop workers have instant intelligence they can rely on.

Solution? Upgrade to an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. While there are costs associated with onboarding this technology, substantial cost savings are associated with streamlining your software environment. In the long run, it’s more expensive to operate your business inefficiently. Using the right ERP technology makes it far easier to scale your business.

Everything may not be able to be automated – however, the spotlight needs to be on work processes that are time-consuming, repetitive, resource-intensive, and prone to human errors. You’re freeing key people to focus on higher need areas by accelerating these through automation and eliminating costly mistakes.

Advantages to Process Automation:
• Increase efficiencies and productivity
• Eliminate some variations and create a more consistent product
• Reduce, even eliminate errors
• Enhance collaboration and communication
• Shorten lead times
• Speed up response times

Having inventory on hand can be a good thing, especially when a customer needs it quickly. Consistently we work with clients whose most expensive line item is too much inventory. Those who reduce their inventory, to the point where they put machines in the same place where inventory used to be, experience massive benefits and cost savings.

Turning Your Inventory Over Faster Results:
• Cash increases dramatically because they sold or used inventory that did not need to be replenished
• Production machines churned out more products instead of putting them on the shelves
• Inventory obsolescence decreases, which minimizes related scrap costs
• Return on assets improved with lower warehouse costs and more production capacity
• Warehouse handling costs drop because fewer materials need handling, counting, movement, etc.

Underutilization of current resources — including people, inventory, machinery, and facilities is money that is left sitting on the table. Millions of dollars are collectively invested annually in these four resource categories, and even minor improvements in percentage points mean huge annual financial gains for companies. Think of it this way — is your existing ERP, accounting system, or spreadsheet usage consuming more resources in your business or freeing them up? Companies that are still maintaining and utilizing old “Information Systems” methods and switching to modern ERP systems can easily see double-digit gains from each of these resource categories annually.

Business growth is a product of the foundation in which the organization is built on. Even with the most incredible team of people, loyal customers, phenomenal products, a great location, and a tremendous reputation, it costs your business a tremendous amount of money if you are not on a solid, scalable, efficient, adaptable ERP foundation. We continuously see how the proper ERP solutions allow manufacturers to effectively harvest the most out of their existing people, inventory, machinery, and facilities – without spending another dime.

Since our founding, SyteLine (CloudSuite Industrial) has been our preferred ERP solution, and we have been fortunate enough for our clients to rely on. Is it the same ERP system that it was in 1986? No, but anyone (including our very first customer) who has upgraded through the years has had the opportunity to witness ongoing improvements in technology, capabilities, usability, and results. In the process, they never lost a single stitch of information along the way and have enjoyed painless upgrades and the opportunity to drive more returns from these four areas of their business. The best part about choosing the right ERP solutions & a reliable partner – we tailer the growth to get the maximum performance out of your resources.

As Scott Koehler, Chief Financial Officer at Paper Machinery Corporation said best, “It would be really hard to calculate a return on investment for this software. It is such a necessary component of everything we do; you almost can’t operate without it.”

Take a page out of the notebook of successful manufacturers and reach out to our team today to get started discussing your options.