ERP for Material Converters/Mill Industries Evaluation Center

What is ERP for Material Converters and Mill Industries?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for material converters and mill industries is targeted at companies that have manufacturing characteristics similar to process industries (such as paints, chemicals, pharmaceutical products, plastics, food and beverages, and so on) but that do not fit the process mold.

ERP for material converters/mill industries covers a range of industrial activities, from the spinning and weaving mills in the textiles and carpets sectors, to the rolling plants of steel, aluminum, and other metals semi-fabricators, to the continuous outputs of paper and board mills. Broad categories for these mills include metals, plastics, paper, packaging, textiles, and carpets.

One thing these mill types have in common is that they have few input materials, but many variations in what they output. An aluminum ingot, for example, can be rolled to plate whose thickness is measured in inches, or to foil whose thickness is measured in microns—and everything between. A plain clothing fabric can be printed in hundreds of combinations of colors and patterns. This complicates conventional forecasting and planning below the generic level.

Like all ERP systems, ERP for mills and material converters focuses on integrating management, staff, and equipment, combining all business aspects into one system to facilitate every element of the milling or material conversion process.

ERP for Material Converters and Mill Industries: Business Drivers and Benefits

ERP for material converters/mill industries facilitates a number of processes specific to those industries:

• Concurrent handling and tracking of several inventory item attributes or specifications, such as heat, dimension (width, length, gauge), form, diameter, shape, grade, grain direction or texture, density, and more.
• Management of the reusable material generated with each production cycle for material resource planning (MRP) or planning requirements, on-floor tracking, and valuation.
• Use of “material selection optimizer” features to pre-filter inventory whose dimensions or chemical or physical properties do not match your order specifications.

ERP for Material Converters and Mill Industries: Risks

Users in the material converter and mill industries can run into severe difficulties if they select a generic ERP application not suited to their sector:

• If you need to be able to make more than one unique part per machine cycle (as in the plastics extrusion industry), generic ERP products will typically use the "byproduct" or "coproduct" concepts to handle this. This is a sign that this is an afterthought rather than a native functionality.
• Traditional systems only look at quantity on hand, demand quantity, and on-order quantity. While they can advise users whether there is enough tonnage to meet the customer demand, they cannot discern whether the available total tonnage on stock meets specific customer dimensional specifications.
• How do you cost a single part if you are making many different parts at the same time? How do you allot the excess material to each part correctly when trying to figure out how much material a job will consume? Normally, generic ERP systems will simply take the part weight, multiply it by the number of cavities making it per cycle, factor in some scrap rate, and thus quickly predict how much material you will consume. However, this often will not work in the plastics injection sector, for instance.

Why Use the ERP for Material Converters and Mill Industries Evaluation Center?

• Focus only on ERP solutions that have been developed with the particular needs of your industry in mind.
• Compare material converter and mill industry ERP solutions side-by-side to gain accurate and relevant insight into which systems best meet your requirements.
• Immediately eliminate solutions that do not meet your criteria, so you don’t waste valuable time or software selection resources.

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