SapphireOne Material Requirement Planning (MRP)

November 6, 2020 10:58 am | by John Adams

SapphireOne Material Requirements Planning (MRP) gives you total control of your inventory and production process.

SapphireOne Material Requirement Planning (MRP) gives you total control of your inventory and production process.

Control inventory, enhance production, reduce costs and forecast for the future with SapphireOne Material Requirement Planning.

What is Material Requirement Planning?

Material Requirement Planning (MRP), also referred to as Material Resource Planning, is a production planning, scheduling and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes and improve productivity for businesses.

Material Requirement Planning has become an essential tool for production facilities, and is designed to answer three important questions for a business – What is needed? How much is needed? And when is it needed?

How to do Material Requirement Planning

MRP works backwards from a production plan for finished goods, which is converted into a list of requirements for the subassemblies, component parts, and raw material that are needed to produce the final product within an established schedule.

Developing a plan for resources within your operation is a must. Without proper resource planning, your operation may have a much more challenging time managing areas of your supply chain such as inventory, production and output – leading to high inventory costs or unfulfillment of customer orders.

Components of Material Requirement Planning

SapphireOne’s Inventory Management module provides many powerful solutions for our clients to manage inventory distribution control and tracking. This includes our inbuilt MRP feature, which gives you the ability to manage your resource planning directly within the SapphireOne ERP system.

SapphireOne’s MPR feature has two main important functionalities. These are:

The ability to track, adjust and analyse historical inventory usage for the past 2, 3 and 4 years.
The ability to forecast your future material resource requirements for the next 2.5 years, calculated based on your historical data.

Control inventory, enhance production, reduce costs and forecast for the future with SapphireOne MRP.

Main features of SapphireOne’s MRP Forecasting tool

Forecast and plan your required material resources for the next 2.5 years.
Forecasting tool is fully adjustable, meaning you can tweak any number and it will automatically recalculate your forecast based on recent adjustments. This is a powerful tool as it gives you the ability to account for and recalculate forecasts for unexpected events and occurrences.
You have the ability to set multiple variants – such as your Minimum/Maximum inventory requirements, Fixed Order Quantities (FOQ), and Lead Times – and the forecast will automatically calculate your future material requirements based on these quantities.
Any line highlighted in blue can be edited to suit your businesses specific forecasting needs.
Once you have made all adjustments, you can select ‘Save & Recalculate’ to automatically populate your new forecast.
You can use this tool to forecast your total inventory, as well as for specific inventory items.

How does Material Requirements Planning work

Main features of SapphireOne’s MRP Usage History tool

Record, track and review historical resource usage for the past 2, 3 and 4 years.
The Usage History graph is fully adjustable, and the graph can be tweaked by moving the blue dot up or down to reflect past monthly performance – allowing you to account for unexpected events within the historical data.
When the Usage History graph has been adjusted, the Forecasting tool will then recalculate future monthly projections automatically based on the new historical usage information.
You can use this tool to track and review usage history for your total inventory, as well as for specific inventory items.

Benefits of SapphireOne Material Requirements Planning tool

Inventory Control – Ensure materials are available, track stock on hand, minimise inventory levels and plan future MRP requirements.
Cost Reduction – A steady flow of inventory reduces holding and delivery costs, leading to more revenue within the operation.
Enhanced Scheduling – Allocate production time among various products and ensure the economic order quantity is achieved on all orders.
Production Optimisation – An optimised production workflow requires the right material, in the right quantities, at the right time. The MRP tool can help to reduce waste and schedule production according to the forecast, allowing equipment and employees to work more efficiently.
Improved Supplier Relationships – MRP will help you balance your sales demand and inventory control with the capabilities and capacities of your suppliers, leading to more transparent dealings and a better understanding of both parties’ business needs.
Plan for the Future – Save your business time, resources and money by using historical data for sales analysis and future forecasting.

Check out the below video for a step-by-step process on how to use SapphireOne MRP, and how it can help improve your inventory and production process.

Any questions?

As always, if you have any questions about how our Inventory Management functionality and MRP feature can help your business, please do not hesitate to get in touch or book a demo with a member of our team. We’re always here to help!

Take your Business Enterprise to the next level with World Class Accounting ERP Application Innovation

June 12, 2018 10:22 am | by John Adams

Innovation in the Enterprise Resource Planning – ERP Application world is a very mature marketplace.

Some of the ERP vendors have been developing their applications for close to forty years, so true world class ground-breaking innovation development in these mature markets are rare and seldom. SapphireOne ERP Accounting provides Top 10 innovations in ERP.

Top 10 Innovations in ERP Application market :-

Document Management System (DMS)

An ERP application with document managing capabilities grants you the ability to conveniently sort and manage vast caches of transaction documents with ease in the shortest time possible. No longer will time be spent on unproductive activities like document filing and searching, the document management system will do all these in real-time.

Not only do you reduce running costs through decreased expenditure on paper and other stationery, your employees can focus on other more productive tasks. By reducing your paper consumption you’re also making your business eco-friendly.

A document management system allows you to implement a stratified documents and sensitive information access protocol. With this framework in place, you can effectively specify and monitor who has access to the documents.

HTML Web Server in A Client/Server application

SapphireOne provides a Web Pack solution with Top 10 innovations in ERP. This is a HTML webserver in-built into SapphireOne server which allows the ability to do data entry, client lookup, vendor look up and other functions from any device that supports a browser such as iPads, iPhones etc. SapphireOne Web Pack also provides the ability to set up and run unlimited Point of Sale (POS) web based stores.

Softphone Integration CRM

A Softphone is a software phone that enable users to call any telephone number without a physical telephone. The Softphone works in many ways such as Computer to Computer or phone to phone where VoIP telephone & adapter is required. Softphone is the bridge between VoIP network and telephone line or mobile network. It enables users to make a call between computer to a phone network and phone network to computer, when you have a dedicated number to receiver call.

The biggest benefit of having a Softphone is you can call any employee, client or supplier without having to worry about software matchup or whether or not they are online. It is a perfect solution for remote employees. A significant part of SapphireOne’s functionality is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Inside SapphireOne CRM package, Softphone has been fully integrated into all aspects of the SapphireOne application. Whether you are calling clients, vendors, employees, or other contacts, all this can be driven from a single click on the softphone icon. This instantly keeps a date & time stamp with the ability to record the call. This built-in functionality can bring immense advantages in managing relationship with vendors, clients and employees.

EDI/API Integration

To manage orders and pay vendors on time, large organisations use electronic data interchange (EDI). EDI decreases the order-to-cash cycle time, i.e. suppliers to retailers get paid faster. This helps to maximise efficiency and minimise errors. EDI improves speed, accuracy, security and trade communication. More than just a data format, EDI is a system or method for exchanging business documents with external entities and integrating the data from those documents into your internal systems. Without EDI capabilities, a business has a greater risk of revenue loss from chargeback penalties, loss of opportunity to the processing delay, loss of reputation and credit with customers.

SPS Commerce’s fulfilment EDI has hundreds of document types covering most transaction types that are commonly used among vendors and suppliers. With a singular focus on the retail marketplace, SPS commerce has revolutionised traditional EDI systems, by developing a model that is the most cost-effective and reliable in the industry.

Barcode Scanning

Data synchronisation in the core ERP application is the biggest concern in Warehouse management or Inventory Management business. Barcode scanners automate the process of inventory management and stock control process. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and checklist evaluation process.

Barcode scanners are usually used to sell the product or to make inventory of the selected product. Scanner will help you to record all the information about the product and thus, streamlines the inventory management process. With Sapphire WebPack Solution all inventory management processes will be available out of the box, and there is no need to separately integrate ERP and barcode scanners.

Material Resource Planning MRP

Material Resource Planning (MRP) is a computer based inventory management system. MRP generates time-based manufacturing and purchasing plans for optimal inventory availability which is tied to historical data of customer demands. MRP is a subset of ERP for managing manufacturing requirements using integrated production planning and inventory controls. The main theme of MRP software is to “get the materials to the right place at the right time”. In any inventory management, regardless of the level of sophisticated technology used, the Saw Tooth pattern is followed. In this pattern there is a certain amount of inventory that you start with, then you consume it, stock levels drop, you reorder the stock, you receive this stock and the process continues.

SapphireOne ERP Application Dashboard

The ERP application Dashboard goes by many names. You most likely would have heard them being called Business Intelligences (BI) or Performance Indicator Dashboards. Regardless of the name, these features do one thing – present business statistics and performance indicators in a visually attractive and graphically intuitive interface. The SapphireOne ERP dashboard utilises graphs, bar charts and other visually engaging design elements that provide a succinct overview of a business’s financial standings.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) & Standard Business Reporting (SBR2)

From 1 July 2018, it is compulsory for all businesses with over 20 employees to report to the ATO after each pay event.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) aligns your reporting obligations of your payroll processes. The information you send the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will include your employees’ salaries and wages, allowances, deductions (for example, workplace giving) and other payments, pay as you go (PAYG) withholding and superannuation information. SapphireOne is fully integrated with STP.

Standard Business reporting (SBR2) allows you to access and download your Business Activity Statement (BAS) directly from the ATO. This function can prefill the form with your BAS document number and other relevant fields.

PDF capture

The task of processing supplier invoices includes sorting documents, manual data entry and archiving the paperwork, this can be time consuming and inefficient. With SapphireOne PDF capture these negative effects can be easily avoided. SapphireOne uses the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in PDF capture function that takes a paper document, usually an invoice, scans and “reads” it and turns it into metadata that can be used to populate fields in a database.

SapphireOne’s PDF capture function can help you streamline daily accounting tasks. Currently, few vendor invoices are processed through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which means that majority of vendor invoices are still received as PDF documents or paper. This makes the processing of capturing the data from a vendor invoice slow and inefficient. Mistakes in classification and data entry lead to late payments, missed discounts, deteriorating relationships with suppliers and cost overrides.

Material Safety Data Sheets

Any organisation or enterprise that is storing products as simple as food, motor vehicle fuel, and farm fertiliser, to dangerous products such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, radioactive or explosive materials require Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS).

SapphireOne inventory has integrated MSDS into the Inventory module which offers 30 unique alphanumeric fields, 10 unique numeric fields and 10 unique date fields which are fully customisable.