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.

Identify and respond to seasonal demand patterns

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.

Improve forecast accuracy

While forecasting is, by definition, an inexact science, its purpose is to improve the quality of predictions and thereby enable the fine-tuning of the balance between supply and demand. In forecasting environments where product ranges and configurations are extensive, bills of material are complex and raw material and component lead times are long, improved forecast accuracy is essential to minimizing inventory holding and obsolescence costs without compromising customer service and brand loyalty.

SYSPRO provides tools to enable you to track and evaluate your forecasts, as well as to identify the possible causes of forecast errors. These tools assist you in optimizing your forecasts to produce the best possible outcome with minimum forecast error. The Inventory Optimization suite of modules enables the entry of manual forecasts, as well as the automatic generation of forecasts via a variety of forecast algorithms, including those that compute for trends, seasonality and cyclical events. In addition, the module provides a competition forecasting method (also known as focus forecasting or the tournament method) which attempts to select the most suitable forecast algorithm, based on a selected error measurement and your SYSPRO sales history data. This enables you to compare results to determine which method is the most suitable for any particular item, whether you forecast products at code, revision, release, or warehouse level. A tracking signal is used to indicate when the validity of the forecast might be in doubt; those items with high forecast errors are highlighted and can be reviewed and adjusted as required.

Forecast accuracy depends not only on the regular evaluation of the forecast error, but also on the integrity and nature of the source data. In SYSPRO, forecast accuracy is enhanced through the ability to automatically filter and adjust outliers, as well as to manually adjust forecast base data for quantitative and qualitative factors. Lost sales can also be included in the demand profile.

Furthermore, SYSPRO's proxy functionality enables the forecasting of new products based on the sales history of similar superseded products which is useful in industries where product life cycles are short.

Improve time to market for customized products and variations

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.

Minimize obsolescence

SYSPRO powerful functionality enables the efficient synchronization of supply and demand, thereby helping you to reduce inventory, obsolescent stocks and lead time to your customers.

In industries where rapid innovation is critical to remaining competitive and trends (such as Moore's Law) continue to apply downward pressure on revenues, strategies to optimize inventory without sacrificing customer service and quality are essential. SYSPRO's Inventory, Inventory Optimization and Requirements Planning modules provide the tools to help reduce forecast error, manage seasonality and optimize inventories to meet customer service targets.

SYSPRO enables you to automate and streamline order-to-delivery processes, and provides complete visibility to an integrated picture of your operations, thereby enabling efficient management of operations in rapidly shifting demand environments. The Inventory Optimization suite provides comprehensive tracking and analysis of forecasts, as well as slow-moving, excess, active and static stocks. Its powerful features enable accurate obsolescence provisioning, product rationalization programs and targeted promotions on slow-moving and end-of-life stocks.

Excess component, work-in-progress and finished goods inventory is further mitigated through the use of SYSPRO's powerful forecasting and material requirements planning (MRP) features. These provide a complete view of independent and dependent demand and supply, as well as accurate time-phased requirements with comprehensive pegging. Component-to-operation linking, along with order policy, lead time and time fence features, enable accurate JIT-based materials replenishment.

For those businesses not requiring full-scale MRP but a simpler derivative, SYSPRO offers Advanced Trial Kitting, which you can run based on a range of user-selected criteria thereby ensuring that you order only the materials that you require. Additionally, true order-linked pull replenishment is provided through sales order- and purchase order-to-job linking and multi-level trial kitting, which enable the automatic raising and linking of the relevant supply orders via simple review.

SYSPRO Factory Scheduler facilitates the efficient preparation and execution of achievable production schedules and assists the production area in quickly implementing the necessary changes when order profiles vary from plan. Additionally, materials-constraint scheduling helps to prevent the accumulation of excess Work In Progress inventories.

Efficient automation, management and tracking of product life cycles is provided through the Inventory, Bill of Materials and Engineering Change Control modules, thereby streamlining time-to-market processes, while efficient warehouse and shelf life management is provided through SYSPRO's powerful inventory, warehouse management, lot tracking and serial tracking functionality.

Synchronize supply with customer demand

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.