One of the important business processes in any ERP is the purchasing, and the ability to ensure that the purchasing is done perfectly and on time is of paramount importance for lots of different sectors.
Retail, Manufacturing & Engineering Project Management
When it comes to retailing, the quality of the purchased products directly affects business performance, a failure in either the purchasing process, the QA or the QC process will add lots of problems to your customer service and after sales process, so ensuring that the quality of your purchased products are up to standards is key when it comes to reselling.
When it comes to manufacturing, the quality of your purchased items is important to the results of your manufacturing, you won’t be able to produce quality products until you get your raw materials qualities in check, this is especially true for batch production products in electronics.
In engineering project management for large machineries, the outsourcing & purchasing plays a very key role in the success of the project, if you don’t check the qualities of your subcontracting, you may not be able to meet requirements of the whole project, and timeline failures might occur due to this.
A Real Life Example
When JUSTPRO managed the project for Glencore Xstrata, there were 24 MCC boards that needed to be built for the Xstrata coal mining sites, the deadline needed to be met strictly, since replacing the E-House and MCC control rooms requires a shut down of the mine site on the specific date.
When it comes to replacement, it involves replacing the new switch room and the entire control system, the sea shipments and land transportation takes several weeks, hence all timelines had to be matched perfectly, it was a timeline crucial process.
Not only that, we had to hand over the E-house on time with quality, and when it comes to the MCC boards, the fabrication process involves copper bars, panel fabrication, cables, and a lot of primary electrical components.
During the MCC fabrication and wiring phase, there was an important device manufacturerd by another supplier, all these components’ quality and arriving time was crucial to the entire project, if there were quality issues or delays, everything that follows behind would be affected.
This was a monumental task that involved so many parties, and after careful planning and designing, we had to setup milestones, trace the entire process, and needed some way to ensure quality and time management was all handled perfectly, which is something also needed in manufacturing and retailing, here is what we used eventually:
A purchasing control module, that is a part of our process execution solution, it was used to control the upstream process, scan to QC was used to ensure the purchased items are inspected on time, and not only does this QC tell you simple yes/no results, it tells you measurable properties, which includes quantified test results.
When it came to the engineering project management, this purchasing process control module traces everything back to the upstream supplier end, the suppliers also have a JUSTPRO web portal to log down key information, which utilizes a milestone approach, letting you know if the production has begun, and if materials are issued, not only that, it provides a percentage of the completion, along with the QA & QC information, thus guaranteeing the final supplied equipment meets the quality, the standard requirements, and the timeline, this combined together ensures success of the engineering project.
In the Xstrata Project, JUSTPRO’s solution managed the entire process from upstream supply chain, to make sure all the components and devices were manufacturerd with quality, and ensured that they were delivered to the factory on time, the entire project’s progress was reported to the project owner through the very same web portal.
The project was a great success, and it proved how solutions along with ERPs can make things so much easier for all parties involved.
Hope you liked the solution, when it comes to ERP purchasing, ensuring the quality of the purchased items and the schedules are on time is a key success factor in your business.
If you’d like to discuss how you can benefit from the same ideas that we’ve used to help our customers achieve ERP success over the last 20 years, feel free to contact us, we’re always ready to help. Feel free to email us at [email protected], or click the ‘Start Project‘ button to leave a message and we’ll reply or call back in 24 hours.