Apollo ERP X for the Metal Fabrication Manufacturing Industry
With over 25 years of industry experience and dozens of clients in the metal fabrication manufacturing industry NTS Apollo’s Enterprise Resource Platform, Apollo ERP X has all the necessary modules and tools to meet the unique challenges metal fabricators deal with daily. Whether your manufacturing process includes manual or automated welding, forming, CNC milling, fabricating ferrous and nonferrous metal products, metal forgings, metal stamping or dozens of other metal fabrication methods, and no matter what you produce, our ERP software can help with the unique challenges of your complex manufacturing environment.
Metal fabrication is unique in that the varying sizes of manufactured metal goods can be as small as a few nanometers across, to thousands of feet in length. Along with specialized labourers who take pride in their skills and knowledge, as well as global competition from emerging markets add to management and manufacturing complexities often found in this industry.
The Unique Challenges for the Metal Fabrication Industry
Metal fabricators face challenges in maintaining enough flexibility in their operations to quickly and efficiently change production capacity while operating multiple streams of supplier replenishment systems. Additionally, metal fabricators must increasingly find innovative ways to use technology to cut-down on waste and inventory overruns as well as manage resources on a global scale to fulfill specific customer design requirements. Additionally metal fabricators are often tasked with connecting to their customers through standard EDI integrations that further streamline the purchasing and demand forecasting systems.
Through years of refinement, the Apollo ERP X software platform has evolved to help metal fabricators of all sizes deal with the following challenges:
- Management of CAD drawings and integration with AutoCAD including import of BOM's from various CAD systems
- Low-cost global competition
- Unpredictability of material availability
- Understanding customer demand
- Complex unit conversion including various dimensional and volumetric measurements that require final unit calculation
- Volatile raw material costs
- Lot and Batch tracking including the ability to differentiate between various batches of the same raw material
- Control of waste and by-products
- Need to reduce overcapacity and associated costs
- Lower production setup times
- Improve work cycle times
- The ability to have an up-to-date, and accurate picture of shop floor conditions
- The requirement to have simple, easy to sure shop floor software that can be customized to various machine and workstation needs
- Variability in methods and tolerances of expansive materials
- Production schedules that must meet those of customer needs
- Demand planning and forecasting
- Response times to changing product mix and changing customer specifications
- Paperwork related to importing and exporting of materials in different currencies and languages
- Customer specific BOM with rapid calculation
- Capacity bottleneck resolution
- Group capacity planning for machines that are customer specific
- Machine and Group Machine planning
- Customer specific order management that can include different requirements for paperwork including custom labeling
- EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for customer and suppliers
- Managing external work cycles (managing 3rd party manufacturing as part of the overall manufacturing process and production planning)
- Quality control
- Shelf Life management - track material data
- Manipulation of work order priorities and deliveries
- Identifying material and equipment conflicts
- Scrap rate and regrind management
- Balancing work cycles on production lines to minimize idle time, reduce setup time and use operators and secondary equipment efficiently
- The ability to react quickly to machine downtime and dynamically change entire production and machine schedules
- Compliance with local, state and country laws around environmental regulations
How Apollo ERP X Software Meets and Exceeds the Demands of the Metal Fabrication Industry
The Apollo ERP X platform is a wholly integrated system designed to run the entirety of a manufacturer’s business and as such can handle all of these metal fabrication specific concerns with relative ease.
Additionally, Apollo ERP X includes a wide variety of integrated modules to help you run your manufacturing business. This include modules for CRM, Inventory / Warehouse Management, Purchasing, Quality Assurance, Logistics, Project Management, Service, Business Intelligence and a dedicated Mobile application for maximum portability and efficiency within your manufacturing environment.
While Apollo does not have a stand-alone accounting module included, we provide a software bridge to most standard accounting packages that allows for the seamless exchange of crucial financial data between Apollo ERP and your current accounting software solution.
Our approach to ERP software is unique. We understand that each of our clients, even within a specific industry like metal fabrication manufacturing is still different, with a unique set of workflows. That’s why through the course of getting to know your particular manufacturing environment we perform a deep and thorough needs analysis with your team. In some circumstances our ERP specialists discover that your specific manufacturing workflow requires specialized functionality. In this case our team of developers can recommend and provide the necessary customizations to the Apollo ERP X platform to accommodate your specific needs.
The Return on Investment with Apollo ERP X
At the end of the day, your investment in an ERP software platform should be bringing design, product lifecycle management and service together in ways that allow for your business to predict, act and rapidly change in accordance with the customer’s needs. This return on investment is readily seen in areas such as revenue growth, improved productivity, decreased machine and operator idle times as well as improved product quality, production flexibility, and profitability.
The Benefits of Apollo ERP X as your Metal Fabrication Management Software
With Apollo ERP X as your solution, your metal fabrication business should expect to see gains in a wide variety of critical areas including:
- The ability to be more responsive to changing market and customer demands
- The ability to take on more complex orders, and offer innovative solutions and products
- Manage maintenance for all of your machines, molds, and equipment
- Higher product quality
- Improved efficiencies across all aspects of your business
- Manage a growing list of parts and materials in your inventory
- Improved costing and forecasting of production runs
- Higher on-time deliveries
- Lower idle times across all of your available resources
- Real-time dashboards to monitor every aspect of the production process
- Monitoring regrinds or scraps to accurately perform job costing
- Shorter production cycle times
- Reduce inventory costs
A Selection of our Medical & Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Clients
COASTAL PACIFIC CRANE - Designs, develops and manufactures a diverse set of cranes, hoists and jibs.
BRENCO - A metal processing and fabrication company specializing in the bending, cutting and forming of sheet and plate metal.
SCHEIBA STAMPING & TOOLING - Specialists in the manufacturing of of small to medium sized stamping products using sun bending and punching & puling techniques.