March 19th, 2010 by Streamline Systems LLC
One of the business questions regularly encountered by Industrial equipment manufacturers is whether an ERP system, in our case Microsoft Dynamics AX, is able to handle reconditioning and overhaul. Many of these businesses exist in the US, and reconditioning is something typically done for equipment with a long life span like power trains, turbines, gears, etc. Reconditioning and refurbishment have become an increased source of new revenue and an important business concern.
In this scenario, the customer sends in a used piece of equipment and the reconditioning process makes it ‘as good as new’ again through full or partial disassembly with a combination of replacement and repair of different components. Reconditioning operations exist often in conjunction with ‘new build’ but they can also run in separate facilities. Some Reconditioning businesses are Make-to-Stock, where no engineering is required, for example the refilling of ink cartridges, the remanufacturing of engine starters, etc. In this case the remanufacturing or reconditioning is a standard process.
Continue Reading
March 19th, 2010 by Streamline Systems LLC
Product Configuration and Engineering
One of the most common business questions we encounter is whether the ERP system is able to combine product configuration with additional engineering.
We understand the question. Many of our customers sell configurable equipment where customer specific enhancements are common. These enhancements have to do with specific applications that the equipment is used in and can never be part of a configuration. For engineering these enhancements are not a big design challenge. The problem lies in the workflow and whether an ERP system is able to handle this business scenario.
Configurators are primarily designed to produce a BOM and a Route, in addition to things like pricing and configured product descriptions (or even entire manuals). The idea behind the configurator functionality is that the produced BOM and Route are complete, so a sales order can become a production order immediately. But for many of our customers this is simply not how their process works.
Considerations…
If the business frequently requires additional engineering on top of a configured product, three things have to be investigated in the ERP system:
Can the BOM as produced by a configurator be changed? This will normally be the case but doing this will create difficulties for the re-use of existing configurations. If the re-use functionality would copy an existing BOM and route of a previously configured item, we would copy the engineered modifications also. What should be done instead is to make copy of the configured BOM and add the uniquely engineered part numbers to it. On the BOM a sales order# or project# should be added for later searching. The copy of the configured BOM then becomes the correct ‘Sales-BOM’ with the engineered enhancements.
Continue Reading
October 15th, 2009 by Streamline Systems LLC
DENVER, Colo. - October 15, 2009 – Streamline Systems LLC today announced that Ascent Solar Technologies (“Ascent”, Inc.), a leading developer and manufacturer of state of the art, thin-film flexible photovoltaic materials and modules, has gone live with Microsoft Dynamics AX business application software utilizing Streamline Systems as their implementation partner.
“Microsoft Dynamics AX software is a very good fit to our functional requirements,” said Gary Gatchell, Chief Financial Officer at Ascent. “Utilizing the expertise of Streamline systems, we were able to implement the software in a fashion to optimize our operations. As a startup company, we were required to establish our financial applications with AX to position us to grow to our potential across the globe. At the same time, we had minimal resources. We had great dependence on Streamline Systems to help us using their vast expertise. We then rolled out the software in our new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. Again, utilizing the expertise of Streamline consultants, we established optimal production processes using Dynamics AX. Our goal is to now duplicate these processes across numerous facilities around the world. With Dynamics AX and the assistance of Streamline Systems, we are now positioned to grow our business globally. Our decisions to go with Microsoft and Streamline Systems were excellent choices.”
“Ascent needed a system that would enable them to go live very quickly to satisfy their start-up operations.” said Larry Cohn, Senior Partner at Streamline Systems. “They also needed a system that would enable them to expand globally in short order. Dynamics AX has the flexibility to enable them to go-live fast while having the full functional capabilities to support them as a large, global entity. As important, they found an implementation partner that has vast expertise in their industry; a partner who knows how to implement the software so that they get the greatest benefits for their business.”
Continue Reading
