At its peak, manufacturing in Australia comprised around 25% of the country’s gross domestic product, however that figure has now dropped to below 10%. Manufacturing has not died out in Australia, it has evolved as new technologies and markets have emerged over time.
According to the CSIRO, over the next 20 years Australia’s manufacturing sector will continue to capitalise on new opportunities that will arise in line with advances in science and technology, for example automation, digitisation, robotics and artificial intelligence. These technological innovations will allow for higher levels of product customisation, increasing the ability of manufacturers to create products that are tailored to customers’ individual needs and desires.
For a lot of smaller Australian manufacturers, full control over the manufacturing process has been a challenge. Many of the business systems commonly used to manage the manufacturing process have lacked the power and breadth of functionality to do the job right. Sourcing, costing and tracking the raw ingredients, sub-assemblies and other individual elements needed to create an end-product has traditionally been quite difficult, with only the most costly and complicated ERP solutions being up to the task.
The Solution
Gain Control of Manufacturing
For Jiwa users, however, this needn’t be a problem. Embedded within Jiwa is a Bill of Materials (BoM) capability. Serving as a centralised source of information used to manufacture a product, Jiwa’s BoM makes it easy to gain complete control over your manufacturing, production and costs.
Jiwa’s BoM function will work well for you whatever industry you’re in. Let’s look at the stockfeed manufacturing sector for a moment. Today, many businesses in this sector rely on manual documentation and processes to manage things. Errors in ingredient sourcing, tracking and costing are possible, often resulting in unfulfilled promises to customers when it’s discovered there are insufficient quantities of elements required to make up the stockfeed batch. Frequently additional items such as bags, stickers, pallets and bulk bags are also tracked poorly or not at all, creating further bottlenecks in the manufacturing process. And if the process for determining costings is weak, this can lead to a big difference between the cost originally quoted to a customer and what the product ends up costing to produce.
So, the last thing you want is to run out of key ingredients and other items when trying to fulfil an order for a customer or to under-estimate the final cost of a batched product. Jiwa allows you to avoid all this by, amongst other things, enabling you to work out whether you have enough quantities of your ingredients to produce the final product. Using the BoM capability, you can create a production mixing document detailing all the ingredients you need to manufacture the finished product, along with quantities or percentage relationships between raw ingredients and other components. From there, Jiwa automates the manufacturing process, from creating purchase orders for the required ingredients and other items through to reserving and allocating current stock, recording material usage, tracking batch and serial numbers, controlling waste and monitoring manufacturing capacity. The manufacturing process can be tracked across multiple stages, enabling you to set production milestones along the way and track performance at each stage.
Gain Control of Manufacturing
In short, Jiwa’s BoM function takes the guesswork out of manufacturing. Rather than have key planning, costing and tracking information reside in a manager’s head or in hand-written pieces of paper, the entire process is systemised. It only takes one slight error during the manufacturing process, for example the under-supply of a core ingredient, to bring things to a halt and close operations. Using Jiwa, you can know for certain that everything is correctly accounted for and fully costed before the machines get running. And you can be sure that when you advise a customer that a product will be shipped on a particular date, it will be. That’s because all the information you need to plan and promise with confidence is right in front of you.
Flexibility is another core feature of Jiwa’s BoM. Jiwa’s interactive Work Order Management panel allows you to make changes on the fly, for example changes to production start dates and the re-allocation of manufacturing resources.
A further benefit of Jiwa’s BoM is that the system stores previous production details. If a previously manufactured product turns out to be a runaway hit that leads to further orders, you can easily recreate the recipe and churn out exact replicas of what you originally produced. Jiwa can also be used as a source of business intelligence if something goes awry. If there is a flaw in a finished product, for example a raw ingredient that should not have been there, you have all the data you need to work out what went wrong and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
To find out more get in touch with us today on (+61) 2 9648 3323 or email us at info@jiwatraining.com.
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