Apollo ERP X for the Plastics Manufacturing Manufacturing Industry

With decades of industry experience and dozens of clients in the plastics manufacturing and processing industry NTS Apollo provides all the necessary modules and tools to serve the unique challenges plastics manufacturers face daily. Whether your manufacturing process includes casting, extruding, forming, injecting, blow molding, thermoforming or compounding, and no matter what you produce, our ERP software can help with the unique challenges of your complex manufacturing environment.

The machines and molds used in plastic manufacturing can vary from relatively simple to extremely complex. When plastic molds are used on specific machines, this can add secondary constraints to the manufacturing process. Furthermore, the process of changeovers (switching molds) can be time-consuming, leaving setup time as one of the most typical and unmanaged challenges that a plastics manufacturer can face. 

The Unique Challenges for the Plastics Manufacturing Industry

Increasingly plastic manufacturers are producing a wider variety of products sourced in smaller quantities from a larger base of raw goods suppliers. Furthermore, global competition has forced plastic manufacturers to find new methods for increasing production quality and profitability.

Through years of refinement, the Apollo ERP X software platform has evolved to help plastic manufacturers of all sizes deal with the following challenges:

• Low-cost global competition
• Poor delivery performance
• Unpredictability of material availability
• Understanding customer demand
• Volatile raw material costs
• Control of waste and by-products
• Need to reduce overcapacity and associated costs
• Lower production setup times
• Improve work cycles times
• Low capacity utilization
• Wide variety of input materials and blends
• Complex versioning and variations of products
• Automatic and up-to-date currency conversion
• Complex unit conversion including various dimensional and volumetric measurements that require final unit calculations
• 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
• Optimizing capacity 
• Paperwork related to importing and exporting of materials in different currencies and languages
• Complex Bill of Materials (BOM) including support for multi-level BOM's that reflect critical interdependencies with plastic recipes, complex multi-cavity tools and multilayer co-extrusion
• Customer specific BOM with rapid calculation
• Capacity bottleneck resolution
• Tracking of material
• Group capacity planning for machines that are customer specific
• Machine and Group Machine planning
• Lot and Batch tracking
• Customer specific order management that can include different requirements for paperwork including custom labeling
• EDI (electronic data interchange) for customers and suppliers
• 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 including moisture content, potency pH, colour, status, and expiration dates
• 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 laws and regulations

How Apollo ERP X Software Meets and Exceeds the Demands of the Plastics Manufacturing Industry

The Apollo ERP X platform can handle all of these plastics manufacturing specific concerns with ease, while competing platforms, even those that specialize in ERP software for the plastics manufacturing industry simply can’t measure up.

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 X 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 plastics 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, an investment in any ERP software platform should see an almost immediate quantifiable result. This ROI 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.  As your manufacturing priorities constantly change based on customer demand and input, Apollo ERP X is flexible enough to keep up with complex operations such as:

• Moving jobs from one to one or multiple machines
• Coordinating color changes to minimize mold and die setups
• Viewing the direct impact of your changes on material, labor and on-time delivery, machine and secondary equipment constraints. 
• Managing last minute recipe substitutions that generate restock and work orders

The Benefits of Apollo ERP X as your Plastics Manufacturing Management Software

With Apollo ERP X as your solution, your plastics manufacturing and processing 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 innovating solutions and products
• Manage maintenance for all your machines, molds, and equipment
• Higher product quality
• Improved efficiencies across all aspects of your business
• Manage a growing list of plastics 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
• Automating compliance process and materials certifications including ISO, HASCP, FDA 

A Selection of our Plastics Manufacturing Clients

Contact NTS Apollo today for a free consultation with one of our ERP specialists and discover how Apollo ERP X can improve your plastics manufacturing business.