5 ways ERP software can empower metals businesses to win

Over the years, metals businesses have invested in technology to meet customer demand and to stay ahead of the competition in key areas of sales, operations, and finance. The problem is, over time, those systems become outdated and siloed, making communicating effectively with each other challenging.  

Think about the inefficiencies and headaches posed by a typical scenario:  

• Your sales team takes a customer’s pipe cut-to-length orders and enters them into one system. 
• Your planning team receives 20 different cut-to-length orders and has to enter them into a second system. 
• Your production team tracks those orders’ specifications and quality requirements on a piece of paper and checks in frequently to monitor the progress. 

In a few steps, you are amplifying the risk of errors and miscommunication while asking your team to enter the same information multiple times. It’s frustrating and requires a high level of follow-up among departments to track the progress of the orders. Multiply this over your customer base, and it’s a bewildering scenario for your team.  

Metals companies have to be faster and more efficient than the competition to grow market share. Thankfully, a unified enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can bring the essential areas of your metals business under one roof, with one central source of truth accessed in real time. Frustrating manual processes and the potential for errors quickly become a thing of the past.

Your operations team is the engine room of your metals business. Get the fundamentals right and it’s plain sailing. Get them wrong and you’re lost at sea – while the competition steams ahead. Empower your operations team members with an efficient ERP system to give them the feeling of accomplishment at the end of every workday:  

• Production visibility. Know what is happening on the floor, including when products and materials are complete and where they are in the cut-to-length or slitting process. Having information like this maximizes machine uptime and can improve customer relationships through real-time updates. 
• Worker efficiency. Metals businesses can use mobile devices to streamline data entry, increase worker efficiency, and allow for real-time tracking. In addition, optimized outside processing allows for more efficient delivery of customer orders. Smart tools improve efficiency for your operations team members and allow them to invest their time in adding value elsewhere.  
• Inventory planning. Having a real-time view of your inventory allows for faster customer fulfillment, optimized production processing decisions, and improved order margins. You’ll minimize delays, optimize inventory, and decrease frustrations.

Many metals businesses have IT teams that spend the bulk of their time running from one emergency to the next. They focus on trying to eliminate the costly downtime that comes with outdated systems. When they are not decreasing downtime, they’re often tasked to deliver reports, importing and exporting between segregated systems. Their role is reactive more than proactive and often full of headaches, frustrations, and exhaustion.  

An ERP system can change the trajectory for IT team members when you empower them with a solution that enables them to become solution providers. Give them the tools and allow them to focus on delivering the next customer innovation, like e-commerce and customer portals, instead of building one-off reports and spreadsheets for your team. You’ll be giving them a new purpose that can positively affect the entire organization.