Manufacturing Enhancements for SouthWare Excellence Series

Overview

The KeyMan Manufacturing Series, a true business management software system, is a powerful tool to help manufacturing firms meet the challenges of today's tough business environment. It was developed in conjunction with the SouthWare® Excellence Series. Together, KeyMan and SouthWare have helped many companies overcome increased competition, experience rapid growth, and become more efficient. The entire system consists of 17 modules. The five KeyMan manufacturing-specific modules are described in the sections following.

Sales Order Processing

Among the many timesaving features of this module is an easy to use, highly flexible sales order entry process. Entire orders may be reproduced from quotations or from sales history. If items with options are used, each option is prompted; and defaults, validity checking, and range checks are built-in. A number of sophisticated alternatives are available for pricing and discounting, varying from customer to customer. The order inquiry provides customer service with a powerful and easy-to-use tool for seeing timely information, at several levels of detail. A variety of printed forms and documents are available, including quotations, acknowledgments, picking tickets, shipping labels, bills of lading, and invoices.

Purchasing

You may issue purchase orders to fill several types of needs, including both inventory and non-inventory items, drop shipments, and items that are purchased especially for a work order or job. Multiple vendors for the same item are maintained, including the vendor's part number, description, minimum order quantity, and contract information. Several reports allow you to evaluate vendor performance in terms of on-time deliveries and price variances.

Inventory Control

You may track varied product lines in multiple warehouses, using bin identification. Raw materials, subassemblies, and finished goods items are all maintained in one item file, allowing you to sell service or replacement parts. A variety of cost and quantity fields are maintained for each item, so you can quickly see how much you have on hand(if appropriate, by bin, option combination, serial number, or lot grouping), as well as the quantity on outstanding work orders/purchase orders, the quantity committed to meet existing requirements, and the quantity needed to meet anticipated requirements.

Estimating and Standards

Estimates may be quickly and easily generated. Estimates may include direct costs as well as overhead and suggested selling prices. The product standards, an important master file is set up and maintained through this module. (The product standard is similar in concept to a bill of materials.) In addition to raw materials, however, the product standards may include labor operations, outside services, user-defined other costs, and comments. Estimates may be based on product standards, other estimates, or they may be entered as special 'one-time' estimates. You may simply change the details of an estimate to see how the changes will impact costs. Some other features of this module include the one-step production reporting,and the standard cost recalculation.

Work Order Control

Work orders, or jobs, are released to the plant floor through this module. A number of production documents may be printed, such as routers, production tickets, material pull lists, and cutting lists. Work orders may be based on product standards, estimates, or they may be entered as 'one-time' production orders. Once released, a work order is used to collect the actual costs and charges that are incurred as it moves through the production process. The standard costs are maintained for comparison. Work in process costs are tracked, raw materials inventory may be relieved, and labor distributions may be created for the payroll module. Other features include a multi-level and phantom product structure. Custom work orders may be issued specifically to meet the requirements of another work order or a sales order.

Resource Planning

You may forecast the material and capacity requirements necessary to fulfill your sales order backlog, based on your production plan. Several useful reports show you time-phased inventory and labor requirements. MRP is a powerful tool for production scheduling and purchasing.

Alandale Industries and Mitchell Gold DesignLine Furniture are using KeyMan and SouthWare in making their businesses more productive.

General Information on The SouthWare Excellence Series

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