Given variable material quality, fluctuating costs, compliance complexities, and erratic demand, producing products on time with consistent quality yields and profitability across one or more plants or co-packers is difficult at best. On top of these challenges, the growing power of retailers and customers, private label pressures, and hyper-competitive markets force manufacturers to aggressively grow both the top and bottom line. Success demands the ability to reduce the cost of quality and customer service, while sustaining service levels that optimize profits and finished goods inventory turns.

But addressing these issues requires business-specific applications and processes that match the demands of today and tomorrow. That’s why enterprising companies rely on the plan-to-produce capabilities of Infor™ ERP Adage to improve product quality, meet service levels, and minimize the cost of quality and service, boosting both revenue and profits.

Infor ERP Adage’s integrated plan-to-produce capabilities ensure the right product quantity at the right quality, the right production costs, and the right cost to boost revenue and profits. At the heart of this business process functionality, you’ll find crucial information and powerful tools you can leverage for breakthrough business benefits.

With Infor, you can manage diverse operational processes aimed at supporting multiple plants, production and packaging lines, and extended processes required to serve customers with, for instance, custom pallet patterns. These processes offset rising input costs with actual production and customer service costs to increase your revenues and profits with existing assets. You’ll minimize the cost of quality and service and achieve lower inventory levels with higher fill rates, added agility, and greater cash flow

Get business specific.

Getting ahead in the process industry requires processbased tools to streamline the daily execution of production, packaging, and post-production processes, as well as the ability to make continual business improvements—whether you’re a food processing, consumer packaged goods, specialty chemical, or pharmaceutical manufacturer.

With each level of production, you’ll find varying batch sizes, co-and by-products, cross-contamination issues, and tank capacity that impact yields and costs. From receipt to shipment, consistent quality and yields, lot track and trace, actual costs, and compliance must be maintained—at the lowest cost and with visibility into the true cost of quality and service—so that you can maximize fill rates with the greatest possible shelf life at the lowest possible cost. To to that end, Infor ERP Adage offers:

Lot track and trace to the sublot level

Starting with raw materials through every stage of production, packaging, and post-production processing, Infor ERP Adage maintains attributes, shelf-life status, and costs with full forward and backward track and trace. Even with multiple levels of production with by-products, bulk batches, and multiple packages, lot track and trace is maintained. Optimization techniques leverage this data to minimize excess materials and costs, while maximizing shelf life. Whether running a mock recall or an actual issue, you can quickly react with the highest level of confidence.

Product structures, equipment, and packaging

Each piece of equipment can have different processing parameters by routing or recipe. For example, tanks have different capacity and diverse in-and-out flows and are limited by preceding and succeeding resources. Infor ERP Adage manages these issues and also handles crosscontamination, shelf-life challenges, lot track and trace, and actual costing. To profitably react when equipment isn’t available or when significant demand fluctuations occur, you can define the best alternate processes to reduce time and costs critical for optimizing margins and fill rates. To improve agility, you can tightly bind sequences from beginning to end or loosely couple processes.

Whether it is consumer, food service, or industrial packaging, effectively dealing with different packaging fill rates, speeds, package size or technology constraints, and allowable products is critical for ensuring quality, optimizing shelf life, minimizing costs, and maximizing fill rates. Moreover, meeting customer, retailer, and regional requirements often demands different package sizes, promotional packaging, or even custom products.

Processing raw material into intermediates that can meet current demand starts with an inverted bill of material. This allows you to take bulk milk, meat, grains, or other materials and produce the most profitable set of intermediates with attributes to optimize the profits of current demand. You’ll be equipped to manage daily operations and react to disruptions, while increasing fill
rates and customer satisfaction.

Actual costing and the cost to serve

To offset the continual margin squeeze by increasing input costs and limited pricing power, manufacturers need to continually enhance production performance to reduce the total cost of quality and compliance. Boosting your first batch success rates and yields not only trims costs, but also improves capacity utilization and fill rates. You’ll also formulate based on lot attributes that can minimize material usage and total manufacturing costs, which allows the best pricing with acceptable margins. Even with today’s volatile prices, you no longer must wait to close your general ledger or monthly allocations of variances to report product costs.

Post-production value-added tasks are often necessary to meet customer or retailer requirements. Whether it is special add-on labels, pallet patterns, RFID, or other considerations, additional costs and complexity may negate any possible profits. Without clear visibility into these costs, future profits are in jeopardy. With true customer or product profitability, future negotiations can be
more profitable, or products can be allocated to the most profitable customers or channel.

Integrated quality and specification matching

Integrated quality management and corrective and preventive action enable you to improve quality or quickly mitigate issues, while accurate specifications increase first batch success rates and throughput. To proactively enhance quality, specification matching compares lot or sublots against specifications and approves usage of lot or sublot to a specification. Since specifications include not only cost and performance, but also allergen, organic, or religious certification requirements, Infor ERP Adage helps ensure your products meet specifications and compliance mandates. The lot allocation engine selects lots with the ptimal cost and shelf life, helping you optimize quality, compliance of every material transaction, and profits.

Extended plan-to-produce

Baseline plan-to-produce processes and better information accuracy make it possible to integrate optimization or cross-functional teams to cut costs, increase quality, maintain compliance, and improve fill rates. By integrating demand, lot attributes, actual costs, and capacity with accurate formula/recipes, you can optimize product plans to minimize material use and enhance asset performance, which boosts your revenue and profits. Every day or shift, scheduling optimization can profitably react to disruptive events, while Infor ERP Adage’s core plan-to-produce capabilities maintain lot track and trace, enhance quality, and ensure compliance. You’ll also optimize capacity and assets, which can reduce your working capital, while increasing your profitability.

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