Apollo ERP X for the Wood Fabricating Industry
Wood, lumber, wood by-products, and furniture manufacturing are a uniquely different and interesting manufacturing industry. Resembling various parts of other industry manufacturing environments, the wood manufacturing industry is often faced with challenges propelled by end customer demand for a greater selection of product lines and customization options including size, shape, color and finish.
NTS Apollo has been specifically designed to support the manufacturing engineered wood products such as furniture, case goods, boxes and containers, toys, and other custom products as well as pulp and paper products and sawmills and planing mills. Our ERP software can help with the unique challenges of your complex manufacturing environment.
The Unique Challenges for the Wood Fabricating Industry
Wood manufacturers face the challenge of an industry whose demands are increasingly requiring products that are manufactured to order and more recently manufactured and delivered directly to the end-customer’s home or business without third-party throughput. Additionally, governments, both at the state and local levels are placing increased scrutiny on the raw goods procurement process and adding complexity to the overall manufacturing environment.
With the help of our wood-manufacturing clients, Apollo ERP X has grown to accommodate and excel at meeting the various challenges that wood manufacturers of all sizes deal with:
- Navigating through a maze of local and state environmental raw good procurement regulations and documentation requirements
- Management of raw goods, lots an batches that can't be mixed including complex and subtle variations of different materials
- Unpredictability of material availability due to changing global weather patterns
- Understanding customer demand
- Controlling the exposure of workers to toxic constituents
- Volatile raw material costs
- Raw material certification processes
- Fire certification processes
- Control of waste and by-products
- Need to reduce overcapacity and associated costs
- Lower production setup times for varying manufacturing workflows including wood sizing, drilling, tooling, sanding, and final assembly
- Improve work cycle 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
- Inventory control including management of first-in / first-out systems as well as material expiry controls (Shelf Life Management), and measuring and managing the susceptibility of various wood to humidity-induced warping and fungus growth
- Complex job costing and realistic scheduling
- 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
- 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
- Quality control
- Manipulation of work order priorities and deliveries
- Identifying material and equipment conflicts
- 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 and tool downtime and dynamically change entire production and machine schedules
How Apollo ERP X Software Meets and Exceeds the Demands of the Wood Fabricating Industry
Despite the myriad of challenges that wood industry manufacturers face, from varying shop floor environments to specific end-product needs, NTS Apollo is capable of meeting all these challenges head-on.
Additionally, Apollo ERP X includes a wide variety of integrated modules to help you run your wood 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 wood 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:
- Absolute traceability on parts, raw materials
- Recalculation of complex engineering rules based on changing size, weight and volumetric variables
- Flexible shipping schedules based on material, fabric and courier availability
The Benefits of Apollo ERP X as your Wood Fabricating Management Software
With Apollo ERP X as your solution, your wood manufacturing 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 your machines, and equipment
- Higher product quality
- Improved efficiencies across all aspects of your business
- Manage a growing list of raw materials and parts 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
- Shorter production cycle times
- Reduce inventory costs
A Selection of our Wood Fabricating Clients
COVE TOPS - A leading manufacturer of postformed laminate and veneer cabinet doors, drawer fronts, countertops, shelving and specialty products.