Using SYSPRO's co-products and manufacturing inspection functionality, you can easily cost and capture the receipt of multiple products of varying grades from jobs originally planned for single-grade items.

You can choose to apportion costs between components and co-products according to a percentage breakdown for total material, operation and sub-contract cost, or you can define percentages against specific operations and materials.

SYSPRO's Work in Progress inspection system gives you the tools to record the inspection details of manufactured items and, depending on the results, select to receipt, scrap or rework quantities. Units in inspection are visible, but unavailable for use until accepted into stock. Within the inspection function, you can capture detailed records of counts, inspection, scrap, rework and stock receipts.

You can receipt inspection items as the original product to manufacture, or as a different product or products, which is useful for end-products of variable grade. Also, you can receipt items into a warehouse different than what was originally planned.

For a purchased item, you can link an electronic copy of the supplier's certificate of conformance to the relevant lot numbers (batches) for the item, using SYSPRO's multimedia capabilities. You can then view the certificate against a lot when querying the lot and processing transactions, such as job issues, sales or transfers.

SYSPRO provides a number of features to assist you in the control and management of hazardous and dangerous goods with regards to storage, packing and transportation.

SYSPRO's multimedia features enable you, per stock code, to link and display graphical, video and text information, such as material safety data sheets, dangerous goods safety marks, and safety gear icons. Operators then have access to view and print the information when required.

In addition, the system's flexible custom form functionality enables you to capture dangerous and hazardous goods information per stock code. For example, you can create mandatory or optional custom forms to capture data such as hazard identification number, class, subsidiary risk, compatibility group, packing group, shipping name and register reference. You can easily configure SYSPRO to display and highlight custom form data on operator entry and query screens; and to print on reports (e.g. picking lists) and on stationery (e.g. job documentation, invoices and delivery notes).

SYSPRO also provides an extensive notes facility, the content of which you can configure to automatically print on certain documentation within the system. Notes include generic notes against all key fields, as well as special key field notes, such as the technical specification, dangerous goods handling, and inspection notes against inventory items.

SYSPRO's multi-warehouse functionality enables you to create virtual warehouses to represent separate dangerous goods storage areas for specific items. Alternatively, you can use SYSPRO's multiple bin functionality to represent segregated storage areas for incompatible items within the same warehouse code.

Chemical production plants are often highly automated with sophisticated measuring and testing systems designed to ensure quality of raw materials and work in progress, as well as high production yields. It is therefore desirable that any ERP production control and tracking system is able to integrate seamlessly with this process technology to exchange information and highlight issues at the relevant points. SYSPRO e.net solutions enables rapid development of secure and version-independent integration with such best-of-breed technology.

SYSPRO enables you to implement continuous improvement by helping you to identify problems and points of waste as they happen. Raw materials and manufactured products in the industry often vary in grade and quality, so tracking and control is essential to reduce waste, scrap and defects. SYSPRO enables you to specify approved manufacturers for raw material supplies and supplier performance can easily be tracked using queries and reports. In addition, SYSPRO facilitates the tracking of materials from purchase through production to customer, thereby maximizing quality control and providing you with the tools to manage product recalls, should they occur.

You can flag purchased items as requiring inspection so that during receipting, detailed records of counts, inspection, scrap, rejects and returns is recorded. Units in inspection are visible, but unavailable for use until accepted into stock. Similarly, SYSPRO's Work in Progress inspection system provides the tools for you to inspect manufactured product quality and, depending on the results, select to receipt, scrap or rework quantities.

SYSPRO's Forecasting module gives you the tools to help you forecast future demand, based on seasonal, cyclical and trend demand patterns in your sales history and lost-sales data, thereby enabling you to plan your production and purchasing to meet these requirements.

A powerful Pareto analysis feature enables you to easily identify fast, slow and obsolete items in terms of sales value, gross profit, cost of sales, quantities sold or hits, so you can make decisions about which items to forecast, and the best method to use for each.
You can choose to create forecasts at stock code/warehouse level, and if the Families and Grouping module is installed, you can aggregate your forecasts into user-defined groupings. A variety of forecast calculation methods are available, including the competition method, and the module also provides facilities to track the forecast quality.

Additionally, you can select to manually forecast items which require market intelligence, while selecting to batch forecast all other items, and filters and adjustments can be applied to sales history to account for outliers and other abnormalities.

Multi-level analysis of product performance is available, including at stock code, warehouse, product class, supplier, planner and buyer levels, as well as at user-defined group level if the Families and Groupings module is installed.

The approved forecast becomes the demand input to SYSPRO's Material Requirements Planning system. This gives your planners and buyers visibility to the resources and actions required to meet the demand in the short, medium and long term.

SYSPRO provides a mechanism for configuring the manufacture of multiple items against a single bill of material, including those products that result from the manufacturing process but which are not included in demand planning.

This is useful for companies that produce by-products as a result of their manufacturing processes and who want to recycle, sell or use these by-products for some other value-added purpose, rather than write them off as unrecoverable scrap.

SYSPRO's multi-level bill of materials functionality enables the definition of complex production recipes of up to 15 levels per route, and 10 routes per finished product.

Control over recipe changes is seamlessly handled by the Engineering Change Control module, while a where-used query and substitution facility enables quick and easy replacement of ingredients. The relationship validation function enables you to easily identify illogical relationships within your bills, while the structure validation function facilitates quick deletion of redundant or superseded components from bill of material structures.

The work center, and structures and routings facilities provide you with the means to define and maintain the elements required in a sequence of internal or subcontract manufacturing operations, as well as the structural relationships between parent and component parts.

For each bill level, you can define ingredient quantities such as quantity per, fixed quantities or wet weight percentages in relation to that specific level's parent item. Component and operation copy, insertion, and move facilities enable straightforward maintenance of new and existing bills. SYSPRO's multimedia functionality enables you to attach visual and textual material, such as videos, photographs, and certificates of conformance, to structures and operations, to aid production and quality assurance staff, while custom forms enable you to create additional user-defined fields.

Phantom bills are catered for to accommodate transient production items, and planning bill functionality aids option forecasting and planning. In addition, the configuration and manufacture of multiple items which are produced in a single process are catered for by SYSPRO's co- and by-product features.

SYSPRO provides various operation run time methods, as well as material and progressive scrap functionality. The capture of various lead time elements enables accurate calculations of manufacturing and cumulative lead times, which in turn aid efficient materials planning and production scheduling, as well as product costing. Information on tooling, operator skill levels, operation instructions and testing requirements can also be added to the operation and printed on SYSPRO's user-defined factory documentation.

The Work in Progress module enables seamless ingredient substitution where actual ingredients differ from planned. Furthermore, where intermediate or finished products differ from planned, the Work in Progress inspection functionality enables receipting of these products as alternate stock codes, or into alternate warehouses or bins.

The standard of service that you provide your customers makes all the difference in building solid relationships and gaining the competitive edge. This requires keeping track, not only of customer sales-related information, but also details of internal or external business relationships. To make better business decisions about expected customer, product and market activity, you need to have information in appropriate formats and at different levels of detail to carry out analysis.

SYSPRO's Contact Management allows for multiple contacts to be assigned to organizations and individuals that you deal with. These can include your customers and suppliers, as well as entities such as charities and government departments. You can group contacts for related entities and record details regarding interactions such as phone calls, emails and visits against the contact. Integration with Microsoft Outlook allows email correspondence to be sent and updated as an activity within the Contact Management system.

Your ability to deliver quality products faster, with more customer-specific features, and at stable or even reduced prices differentiates you in a discerning market place. Features such as available-to-promise and customer delivery performance reporting, provide information to help you improve your customer service levels, and the Customer/Stock Code Interchange function gives you the flexibility to allow your customers to order by their part number.

SYSPRO enables you to keep a history not only of sales data but also individual customer-related product activities, so you can easily identify buying patterns and preferences, and quickly create repeat orders by copying and amending previous ones. SYSPRO Forecasting uses sales history to identify trends and seasonal components of demand, thereby assisting you in calculating more accurate forecasts, which in turn leads to better planning and improved customer service levels.

Simple, extended and contract pricing mechanisms give you flexibility to apply one-dimensional pricing and discounting, or tailor these requirements to individual customers. Where customers are large organizations—such as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) or retails chains—with whom prices are negotiated on a contract or volume basis, more complex pricing is required. SYSPRO's pricing, trade management and sales analysis facilities enable you to provide acceptable pricing terms and delivery targets to large customers without sacrificing profitability.

SYSPRO provides the tools to help you optimize your inventory investment without sacrificing customer service. It enables you to effectively plan and control diverse and extensive product lines in a single or multi-warehouse environment, facilitating the creation of warehouses and bin locations to represent both physical and virtual stock locations.

Whether you stock, sell, purchase or manufacture items by unit, weight, volume, pack or container size, SYSPRO's multiple units of measure per stock item give you the flexibility to accurately record and track stock quantities. Product version control is automated through the Engineering Change Control module, while extensive master data enables you to define parameters for transacting in sales, purchasing and manufacturing.

Inventory optimization functionality aids the sales and operation planning process. Decision-making on desired levels of inventory and customer service is enhanced through the graphical output from its powerful Pareto analysis and forecasting tools. Master information such as order policies, gross requirements rules, lead times, safety stock and minimum/maximum levels assist in planning replenishment. Extensive costing facilities ensure accurate costing of sales, purchase and manufacturing activities. Costing methods are available by warehouse and include the average, standard, last, FIFO, LIFO methods. Furthermore the system provides the ability to track actual and activity-based costs. The custom forms feature gives you the freedom to define your own fields for the capture of details, such as hazardous goods information, enabling you to include these in your queries, reports and transaction documentation. Also, you can add standard notations per item for automatic inclusion in various transactions such as sales orders, purchase orders and jobs, as well as link multimedia files to key data.

SYSPRO's serial tracking and lot traceability features facilitate the tracking of materials from purchase through production to customer, thereby providing you with the tools to manage product recalls, should they occur, and the optional 2-phased receipting for purchased and manufactured products provides inspection control. The Goods in Transit system gives you comprehensive quantity, variance and cost control over inter-warehouse transfers, as well as providing input into SYSPRO's Distribution Requirements Planning. The Stock Take system enables you to select on a range of criteria and continue transaction processing once the physical count is complete, so operations are not delayed while the count is being captured. Import facilities are available and you can run a number of verification and variance reports to highlight stock take exceptions and provide the necessary checks before confirmation.

SYSPRO's integrated nature and powerful reporting and query facilities give you visibility to detailed stock statuses and transaction history, while perpetual inventory costing provides at-a-glance valuation of stock holdings by warehouse and stock code. Queries include summary stock code quantities, such as warehouse on-hand, on-order, available, free, in-transit, in-inspection, allocated and backordered, as well as the ability to drill-down to supporting detail. Extensive reporting is available including detailed kardex movements, identification of obsolete, slow-moving and excessive inventories, as well as reports on summary inventory quantities and exceptions based on various stock level criteria. In addition, the Office Automation and Messaging module provides the ability to create alerts and events which are automatically fired when inventory exceptions, such as 'below minimum' occur.

Whether a compliance-critical requirement, or an analysis tool for continuous improvement strategies, the traceability of products from material origins through manufacture to final destination, is a key system requirement in many industries.

SYSPRO facilitates the recording of traceability and quality data on materials and products from purchasing through inspection, manufacturing, manufacturing inspection, stocking and sales. The recording of expiry and shelf-life information is also facilitated and powerful queries enable both upward and downward searches by stock code, lot number and transaction type.

SYSPROls lot traceability and serial tracking functionality afford full visibility to the origins, build and customer destination of products and batches, thereby providing the means to rapidly trace and analyse the source of defects, should they occur. In addition, SYSPRO's Engineering Change Control module enables complete management and traceability of changes to product designs, while the Return Merchandise Authority provides consistent handling of product returns, as well as analysis data for improvement programs.

SYSPRO's integrated nature enables full backward and forward traceability, as well as comprehensive record-keeping to meet strict compliance requirements. Shelf-life management is facilitated through expiry dates and you can use SYSPRO's customization and custom form features to record other compliance-code dates, as well as to capture storage and transport compatibility codes.

SYSPRO's Quality Management System (QMS) enables the configuration and tracking of quality inspection points and metrics, to help ensure product quality and high production yields. Where a full QMS system is not required, the system can be configured to force sample, or full quantities of items through inspection processes, where detailed records of counts, inspection, rework, scrap, defects and returns can be recorded. Basic quality management is further enhanced through the ability to specify approved manufacturers for material supplies, as well as the ability to monitor supplier performance.

Tracking material involves knowing where it is at any point in time. In addition to SYSPRO's powerful traceability features, the system provides inventory management and visibility across multiple physical and virtual locations, as well as detailed tracking of purchase orders, sales orders, works orders, inter-warehouse transfers and available-to-promise quantities and dates.

SYSPRO's e.Net Solutions enable integration with scanning and RFID systems, to reduce processing time, as well as processing lags and errors, as material moves through the different processes.