Logistics and production

Speed, accuracy and flexibility has become increasingly important for many companies. It is also increasingly demanded by customers and can make the difference with the competition. But it can also contribute to cost reduction.

This requires some adjustments sometimes. A department should mainly be concerned with its key activities. Especially in the production and warehouse, administration is often perceived as a secondary activity that is disruptive to the real work. As it should. This should be kept to a minimum and should not lead to delays.

Administrative tasks

However, administration is necessary. Some examples of administration on the work floor:

• Control of warehouse or production orders
• Requesting additional information
• Registration of hours
• Registration of stock
• Registration of inventory location
• Registration of receipts
• Registration of progress
• Registration of consumption
• Registration finished products
• Registration of deliveries
• Quality check
• Printing labels
• Printing accompanying documents

Sometimes just a paper administration will do. Initially, this seems the easiest and cheap but this soon gives additional workload - also for the office - with regard to printing and sorting work, lost or unreadable paper, incorrectly entered data, outdated information or additional administrative entering and correction work afterwards. All in all, many employees are working on this hours per day. Valuable time at the expense of their specialism or other tasks.

Optimization

How can automization contribute to reducing all of this extra work to a minimum and increasing the speed, accuracy and flexibility?

With barcode scanning or RFID quite often much can be achieved.

A step further in the optimization is paperless production.

Also, only parts of this can be adopted so results can be achieved quickly whereas efforts are confined. Sometimes machines or other systems have to be fed with data from the office, or vice versa. For this we can support you as well, with solutions in the field of interfaces, database connections or applications for data extraction.

Business Intelligence

An important task of automation is to provide insight. First of all, the data must be available for this purpose. The main source of data is typically the ERP system, possibly supplemented with other sources.

Retrieving data in a useful way from the system is a different story. The various sources and units should be linked together the right way in order to make the data reliable and useful. And compressing all detailed information into a useful overview for management calls for further processing of all data.

Fortunately, there are tools available that make life easier and bring creating reliable, usable reports to the user. Together with our partners we can support in offering a market proven solution. Want to know more? Just contact us and we will be pleased to tell you more.

Business systems analysis

Optimization of business processes starts with a good analysis. The main questions seem to be obvious but are not: Where are we now, where do we want to go to, who and what is dependent of it, how do we apply this best in the overall process and what are the alternatives? But above all: why? Couldn't it be done handier or are we doing so because we are simply accustomed to it? Can we combine or eliminate tasks to make it more efficiently?

These questions can be asked for processes but are also valid questions when it comes to the business systems.

With critical questions, a sober look at the business processes, knowledge of ERP systems and related automation, understanding exceptions and the working methods of employees in practice and with 15 years experience I will be pleased to help you out. Please feel free to contact to discuss what I can do for you.

About

Bieleman ERP & Logistics Consultancy is driven by Aart Bieleman, based in Rheine, Germany and with a Dutch background. Independent, founded in 2012, without high personnel or office expenses but with the benefits of partnership, which will benefit the continuity and the knowledge and service level that we can offer together. In general, the field of work covers support and process optimization using automation. The focus is on the chapters as mentioned elsewhere on this website. Together with the partners we cover one step further. Feel free to ask what we can do for you! A strong motivation is doing the work better. Deliver quality which is giving (customer) satisfaction, following the unwritten rules of logic and common sense. How this reflects practice? For example by always being positively critical and alert, by just thinking one step further and by not being satisfied too quickly. And - very important - by starting at the main purpose, and from there focusing on details.

Every improvement - small or large - starts with an analysis, sometimes it doesn't require much more than common sense. But most importantly understanding the practice situations who would like to deviate from the ideal process. Also understanding of how people work or would like to work.

Of course, quick wins are quickly earned. And, of course, to finish the project on time and within budget is important and a healthy balance should be found. But quality is always important and something that I personally stand for. Working as a self-employer also gives room for a fresh look from a distance or to work at development as a preparation. Also when those hours are not billable. The work should be a hobby sometimes and the space for the mix leads to a higher quality level. A level with improved usability which will eventually lead to further cost savings, often also in the hidden costs.

And that is exactly what we want to achieve together.


Sincerely,


Aart Bieleman