Most manufacturers can tell you what they sold and what they spent. Far fewer can tell you, reliably, what a specific batch cost to make, as material, labor, and overhead are captured across disparate systems and reconciled manually at month-end.
Sub-assemblies, alternates, scrap factors and version history. A BOM change is dated and traceable, so old work orders keep costing against the BOM that was live when they ran.
Issue, operation-level progress, downtime reasons and rework, captured at the machine on a tablet or scanner rather than on paper collected at shift end.
Requirements netted against actual on-hand, in-transit and committed stock, using real vendor lead-time distributions instead of the quoted number.
Material, labour and applied overhead land on the work order as they happen, so batch cost is a query rather than a month-end reconstruction.
| Area | Included | Common integration |
|---|---|---|
| Production | BOM, routing, work order, MRP, capacity | Machine PLC or SCADA for counts and downtime |
| Inventory | Raw, WIP, finished goods, batch and serial traceability | Barcode scanners, weighbridge |
| Quality | Inspection plans, non-conformance, CAPA, certificates of analysis | Lab instruments |
| Costing | Standard vs actual, variance analysis, overhead absorption | Payroll for labour cost |
| Compliance | Batch genealogy, recall trace, audit evidence | Regulatory filing portals |
Orders sequenced against changeover time, due date and material availability. The planner adjusts a proposed schedule rather than building one from scratch every morning.
ORDERS → CHANGEOVER → DUE DATE → SEQUENCE
Flags batches whose yield or consumption departs from the pattern for that product and line, before the variance is buried in a monthly average.
BATCH → BASELINE → DEVIATION → ALERT
Correlates recorded downtime reasons with output loss and cost, so maintenance spend is directed by evidence rather than by whichever machine broke most recently.
DOWNTIME → COST → RANK → PRIORITY
A 45-minute call. Bring the workaround that annoys you most and we will tell you, honestly, whether it is an ERP problem, an integration problem, or something you should not spend money on at all.
See ERP modules
