ERP for Process Industry Companies

Several times people ask me what my duties consists in or the reason why a company could need my work. As IT Consultant, I always solve this situation in two main steps, starting with a formal definition and ending with a practical sample. And which could the best sample be? Then this sample consists lately in a short explanation about an ERP Selection Process. 

One of the selection process in which I have been involve during the past year was an ERP Selection for a seeds company. Despite several years of work and more of experience in ERP projects, finding the right ERP for any given company using a limited list of resources is still a hard and special work. Among all industries there was certain field where neither accurate selection, nor different vertical solutions nor vendors expertise could help to fulfill completely the large list of requirements and several topics to assure the investment (TCO, ROI,..). That field is Process Industry, where we will include others like food-and-beverage, pharmaceutical and R+D and so on.

The key points at the requirements list were:

• ·         Accurate item tracking, indeed as accurate as current country and international laws.

• ·         Lot Managing. Process Industry does not use to manufacture a single product with a single identification, use to manage several lots of a product which could be used in different production lines and for different purposes. Splitting and merging lots are most common operations in a manufacturing plant and focus of optimization in production processes.

• ·         Quality tests and evaluations. Allowing different types of lots for the same item, i.e: corn with A Quality and chicken with B Quality. But the best ERP must manage re-assign qualities to certain lots after a improve quality process.

• ·         Delivery Tracking, in which location or warehouse is or was a certain product with a certain lot number?

As you can see the key factors lays on the manufacturing and delivery ERP modules, but does not mean rest of modules are not important enough, otherwise are more or less cover but the best-in-breed standard ERP solutions.

Once RFP is finished, we continued creating a study case building the best-in-breed standard solutions up with several vendor with success cases inside the industry process field (SAP, Microsoft Dynamics AX, J.D Edwards, CDC, QAD, Lawson and Infor were the standard products).

We went on with demo and RFP fill up for each vendor evaluation, key functional areas and requirements and we ended with and TCO and ROI report about them.

It is always difficult to select among the finalists but in this case all the parts in selection we felt very comfortable and fulfilling completely the key requirements and widely the rest of them, being the Microsoft Dynamics AX with Microsoft Industry Process vertical solution the chosen one.

Nevertheless I only found one paragraph about this new vertical solution included on Dynamics AX portfolio at Microsoft’s “Statement of Direction”, bought to Fullscope with more than 5 years of live and hundreds of success cases.

IMHO, Microsoft Dynamics AX with Process Industry vertical addition is one of the top standard ERP products for a new or an updating implantation in food-and-beverage companies, Pharmaceutical enterprises and so on.