SYSPRO enables the tight control and tracking of raw material purchases from foreign suppliers. You can set up approved, preferred and alternate suppliers, along with their pricing and catalogue cross referencing, and can specify standard purchase lead times against which to measure actual Delivery Performance. In addition, the blanket purchase order facilities enable you to specify pricing for an agreed quantity of product, as well as to track actual call-off deliveries against contract.

The Purchase Order module gives you the tools to raise and track detailed Purchase Orders and associated deliveries, and provides local and foreign purchase order print and export facilities. Additionally, the Office Automation module enables faxing or emailing of Purchase Orders directly from within SYSPRO.

SYSPRO enables you to hedge against unpredictable supply of longer lead time items through the use of minimum and safety stock levels, as well as flexible order policies. Material Requirements Planning and Advanced Trial Kitting provide facilities for calculating what you need and when you need it, taking into account, demand and supply, lead times, current inventory levels and order policies.

You can rely on SYSPRO's landed cost tracking and multi-currency capabilities to provide an accurate picture of the costs of your imported goods, as well as associated variances between estimated and expected for all cost elements associated with imported items. In addition, the GRN Suspense system highlights any discrepancies between invoice details and actual purchase costs and deliveries.

Plan and control capex expenditure

For corporate governance requirements, as well as cash flow and operational efficiency, it is critical to budget for capital expenditure and to forecast the requisite cash requirements. SYSPRO's Asset Capex System facilitates the creation of both broad and specific capex budgets with the latter forming a subset of the broader budget category; for example, a piece of equipment within a production cell or line.

You can capture up to three quotations for a capex line and once the capex line is approved, you can rapidly generate a new purchase requisition, purchase order or a job, or link to an existing one. The approval process is controlled through a series of capex line statuses, including unapproved, approved, on hold and closed.

SYSPRO provides simplified acquisition processing once the asset is receipted from a purchase order or a job. The asset is placed in suspense and through a user-friendly suspense review facility you can retrieve and check the details of the suspended asset on-line before automating its transfer to the live asset register. This reduces double entry, as well as the margin for capture errors.

Comprehensive queries and reporting is provided on committed, uncommitted and spent capex values.

Remain profitable in a low margin, price-deflated environment

Maximizing profitability in a highly competitive market is only possible with an accurate picture of your costs. For a capital-intensive industry that is characterized by low margins, short product lifecycles, and substantial research and development costs, closely monitoring and controlling costs and margins, and reducing waste in all areas of the business is essential to your on-going profitability.

SYSPRO enables you to implement continuous improvement by giving you visibility to costs and profits across the business and helping you to identify issues as they occur. This includes variations in expected and actual raw material and production costs; late supplier deliveries; obsolete, slow-moving and excessive inventories; and product defects and scrap.

SYSPRO's extensive pricing and trade promotions features, as well as its costing methods configurable by warehouse enable targeted pricing and close analysis and control over margins and profitability throughout product life cycles; available costing methods include Average, Standard, Actual, Last, LIFO and FIFO. In addition, what-if costing features enables you to model possible changes in raw material and labor costs and assess the imploded effects on higher level item costs and profits.

Tracking the costs of long sales cycles and product development activities is essential to identifying true return on investment. SYSPRO's Engineering Change Control functionality enables improved control over product development activities, while SYSPRO's Work in Progress enables the capture, costing and tracking of time and materials consumed in various development cycles and business programs. This provides instant visibility to project cost performance in relation to budgets, as well as the timely identification of cost reimbursement values.

For complex long-cycle projects, SYSPRO's Projects and Contracts module enables project accounting and detailed analysis of activities and costs by user-defined section. Estimating and quotations functionality facilitates accurate costing and quoting of to-order products, services and projects, ensuring accurate profitability projection.

Efficient management and tracking of product lifecycles 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, lot tracking and serial tracking functionality. Full integration to SYSPRO's General Ledger from the relevant sub-systems affords up-to-date analysis of enterprise-wide financial key performance indicators (KPI) and trends. Furthermore, SYSPRO's digital dashboards, Analytics, Reporting Services and extensive VBScripting and customization features provide the facilities to configure and track industry- and enterprise-relevant financial and operational KPIs.

Remain profitable in the face of fluctuating raw materials costs and margins

Understanding the true cost per transaction of doing business means identifying contributing elements, direct and indirect, across the entire organization. These include not only the cost efficiency of operational activities and their interrelationships, but also the time spent on manual and redundant processes, reconciliations, paperwork and reporting, as well as the cost of lost opportunities from a lack of agility in responding to the global marketplace.

SYSPRO provides essential integrated visibility to your accounting, distribution and manufacturing operations, thereby enabling you to easily identify and track your cost elements and to target areas of waste for improvement programs. Additionally, it facilitates the automation of many processes that have traditionally been labor intensive and time consuming, such as operational-to-financial reconciliations and communicating with trading partners.

SYSPRO offers Standard, Average, Last, FIFO and LIFO costing methods flagged at warehouse level, thereby providing accurate operations-focused inventory valuation, which in turn supplies accurate input for product pricing and profitability. Comprehensive multi-level costing of manufactured items is provided through the Bill of Material and Work in Progress modules, with the Product Configurator and Quotations and Estimating modules providing additional tools for assemble/make/engineer-to-order environments. Lot traceability, serial tracking and return merchandise functionality, along with SYSPRO's inspection systems, provide tracking of product defects, thereby helping you to mitigate costly recalls.

SYSPRO's cost rollup and implosion functionality, along with user-friendly costing queries, provides fast access to reliable information on which to base pricing and profit margins. In addition, its extensive what-if costing features enables modeling and comparison of the cost effects of alternative inputs, such as raw materials, production routes, labor rates and subcontractor rates.

SYSPRO provides work-in-progress tracking, enabling evaluation of detailed actual-versus-expected costs, as well as targets for cost savings and continuous improvement programs. Used in conjunction with the Projects and Contracts module, it facilitates comprehensive project job costing. Visibility to production scheduling, along with what-if sequencing and scheduling tools, enhance manufacturing agility and competitiveness and help to prevent lost sales in unpredictable demand environments.

Excess inventories tie up valuable resources both in terms of cost and warehouse management. SYSPRO helps you optimize, manage and track your inventories through its multi-warehouse Inventory, Material Requirements Planning, Purchase Order and Work in Progress modules. In addition, the Purchase Order and Landed Cost Tracking systems provide a more accurate estimate of the full landed cost of imported goods, with the GRN matching and reconciliation features facilitating electronic reconciliation of supplier deliveries and charges.

Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Cash Book provide comprehensive balancing and reconciliation tools, as well as credit and cash flow management capability. Additionally, efficient administration of customer accruals, rebates and deductions is facilitated through the Trade Promotions Management module. Commitment accounting is provided through the Accounts Payable and Purchasing modules, while the Assets Register ensures accurate maintenance and depreciation costing, and asset profit and loss realization.

SYSPRO's General Ledger module provides powerful queries with drill-down from journal to transaction source, as well as at-a-glance financial and activity ratios. Processing time is greatly reduced through features, such as sub-ledger integration and reconciliation, journal copy, journal import, automatic weighted transfer of costs and G/L analysis. Furthermore, SYSPRO's ease of ledger consolidation across complex businesses, along with its XML-based financial reporting features, enables prompt web-based deployment of financial reports to SYSPRO and non-SYSPRO users alike.

SYSPRO's flexible user-defined stationery formats, along with SYSPRO Reporting Services (SRS), precludes the need for pre-printed stationery for invoices, delivery notes, order acknowledgements, dispatch notes, purchase orders and statements. In addition, SRS provides considerable savings by reducing the need for paper-based audit trails and reporting. Its automatic scheduling tool precludes the need for resource-intensive supervision of periodic and month-end reporting. Furthermore, the archiving feature provides for the electronic storage of reports as run, thereby enabling users to view them on-line to discern actual print requirements.

SYSPRO's Office (SOI), fax and email integration saves time, postage and paper by enabling you to deliver transactional documents, such as purchase orders and statements, directly from their point of extraction via secure electronic means. Additionally, SOI facilitates direct queries of key operational data from the desktops of enterprise-wide users and trading partners, without the need for the desktop installation or licensing of SYSPRO.

The capability to extend electronic communication, so as to automate the acceptance and acknowledgement of orders on a 24/7 basis, is provided via SYSPRO's e.net solutions, Document Flow Manager and Web Applications. Furthermore, SYSPRO's e.net solutions tools afford non-proprietary and version-independent integration to mobile devices and best-of-breed applications, such as shop floor control and quality monitoring systems.

The ROI of implementing SYSPRO is rapidly realized through full visibility to an integrated picture of your business operations and the resultant reduction in operational costs, processing time and human resources.