ERP Resources & Practical Guides

Some ERP questions are too specific for a feature list and too durable for a blog post. How deep a bill of materials should go. Whether a job can be released when two components are short. What a work-order variance is actually telling you. These are the questions that decide whether a system works in a real plant, and the answers do not change much from one year to the next.

The guides below are written for those questions. Each one takes a single problem, explains how it behaves in practice, sets out what to ask a vendor to demonstrate, and says plainly what exactllyERP does about it. They are grouped by the problem you are trying to solve rather than by module, because that is usually how the question arrives. They are written for the people who will have to live with the decision afterwards: the planner, the finance lead, and whoever ends up owning the system once it is implemented.

Choosing and evaluating ERP

The stage before anything is bought: working out what you actually need, and testing whether a system can genuinely do it. Most useful if you are early in a search, or have sat through a round of demonstrations and come away unsure what you actually learned.

ERP selection and evaluation A method for running an evaluation: deciding whether replacement is justified at all, defining requirements before you sit through demonstrations, and the scenarios that separate vendors who can do the work from vendors who can describe it. ERP buyer guides Fifteen guides covering the decision itself and the operating detail of eight industries: requirements and sign-off, industry fit, deployment, pricing and TCO, implementation, what to make vendors demonstrate, and the integration and support model you live with afterwards.

Planning and controlling production

How a product's structure turns into a material requirement, how you decide whether a job is ready to release, and how you know where it has got to once it has started. The three guides read in sequence: product structure, material readiness and release, then execution visibility once the job is running.

Material structure and multi-level BOM How deep a bill of materials should go, why an inaccurate structure produces plausible numbers that are wrong, and how a requirement is netted against what is already available or already coming. Production planning and material requirement What sits between a customer commitment and a released work order, and what a planner needs to know about a shortage before deciding whether the job can start today. Work-order execution and shop-floor tracking Where a released job has actually got to: material tracked as work in progress, stage completions, how to interpret percentage complete, and finding the jobs that are running late. Capacity, routing and process time How routing ties each operation to the machine or process behind it, how the capacity a plan requires is compared with what is available, and how expected process time is read against actual.

Costing and manufacturing performance

What a finished job actually cost, and which part of it went differently from the plan. Worth reading if you already receive a variance figure every month and have never been able to do anything with it.

Work-order costing and variance Why a single variance figure changes nothing, and how expected and actual cost have to be built so the difference can be read by cost driver instead of as one undifferentiated total.

Material, inventory and outside processing

Keeping track of material that is not where you can see it. Relevant to any operation where part of the process happens at someone else's premises.

Job work and subcontracting What has to stay true when material leaves your premises for one operation, how a return is reconciled against what was issued, and what to do about the quantity that does not come back.

Quality and production exceptions

What happens when a production stage does not deliver everything that entered it: practical guidance on production exceptions, rejected quantity, keeping rework connected to the original job, and what production actually returned against what the BOM expected.

Rejection and rework tracking How accepted and rejected quantities stay visible at a production stage, why the rejection reason matters more than the number, and how rework remains linked to the original job. Scrap, by-product and yield tracking How the output quantity a BOM defines is compared with what production actually returned, how yield becomes visible from that comparison, and how quantities such as scrap and by-product stay separate.

Inventory and traceability

Keeping inventory identity intact as material and finished output move through locations, production, external processing and dispatch.

Batch and lot traceability How batch and lot identity stays attached to every inventory movement, how a finished batch can be traced back to the input lots it came from, and how dispatch records show who received it.

Looking for something more topical?

These guides are written to stay useful for years, so they keep clear of anything tied to a particular quarter. Commentary, sector observations and shorter pieces on current operational questions live on the blog.

If one of the pages above describes something you are dealing with now, it will tell you what to put in front of a vendor before you decide anything.

For accounts of how specific businesses actually run these operations, rather than reference guidance, see the customer stories.