When implemented and utilized correctly, financial management software can help organizations better track their assets and streamline business processes to achieve these goals, which will ultimately fuel organizational growth and positively impact the company’s bottom line.
Penetrating the Fog of War
Without question, the single biggest advantage of integrated financial and supply chain management software solutions is the ability to penetrate through the "fog of war" that is a part of virtually every manufacturing environment. This creates a clear line-of-sight to make important connections and to enhance the visibility for essential information. That capability -- to make data available when needed and to identify relationships -- creates opportunities for significant efficiency improvements.
With different manufacturing lines, different categories of parts and materials, different providers, and different customers, optimizing efficiency can be an overwhelmingly complex task. The more integrated your financial and supply chain management system is, the more you can drill down and extract relevant and actionable information from the noise -- no matter how many "moving parts" are in play.
Manufacturers moving from segregated legacy systems to a new integrated system find themselves with the newfound ability to cull vital insights, identify pain points and focus on inefficiencies. For example, users can analyze scheduling to identify precisely where and when important deliveries have not arrived on time by performing a quick comparison between expected and actual delivery dates. If those discrepancies can be narrowed down to a discrete group of suppliers or variables, the problems can be more effectively addressed and remedied.
In addition to tightening timelines, the ability to integrate financial data on many different levels -- executing a comparative analysis and subsequent monitoring of inventory, scheduling, cost structures, and revenue structures -- can reduce waste and inefficiency in a more fundamental manner. That kind of visibility into the system enables manufacturers to take better advantage of optimized inventory levels, drastically reduce or eliminate overstock, better avoid out-of-stock circumstances and enhance inventory-forecasting capabilities to maintain optimum production levels.
The ability to avoid assembly lines having to be stopped, started and/or reconfigured is a tremendous time- and cost-saving advantage. The best integrated financial management software provides manufacturers with the ability to scan and track important information based on a wide range of criteria, including client name, date, location, type of material and other variables. It is this highly flexible and adaptively functional utility that makes these systems so effective.
