5 INDUSTRIOS ERP Tasks to Tackle in a Slowdown

Business slowdowns happen. No business or sector is perfect, and there are areas of improvement for all of us. There are many articles written about how to come out of a slowdown stronger. The common thread to these is an emphasis on how you use the additional time you have on your hands during the slowdown period. Used judiciously, time invested in continuous improvement invariably leads to a stronger business.


Of the many articles out there, here are the links to a couple of articles that suggest various ways that a company can work to turn an initial slowdown into a strong rebound.

Following that thread, here are 5 areas in INDUSTRIOS ERP that could be the object of continuous improvement efforts, which could improve communication and collaboration inside your organization. Often these tasks are relegated to Phase 2 status, and never get implemented due to lack of time when business is running at full speed.  Keep in mind that this text is written from a sales and marketing department’s perspective, but the concepts could be applied in any other area.

  1. Version update: IndustriOS Software continually updates its software and makes updates available free of charge to customers currently on a PlantCare plan. These updates can contain 3 types of enhancements: problem fixes and technology patches; requested product functionality enhancements and planned technology updates.Understandably, manufacturers tend to delay version update implementations as ERP system updates generally affect all areas of manufacturing, from quoting through to customer service and everything in between, and therefore require concerted effort. Although updates themselves are free, a controlled implementation will include planning, testing in a test environment, and execution on the production system.A slowdown period can be the ideal time to get caught up and start operating on the latest version, as more time is available for testing established processes, as well as implementing newly released features of the updated version. INDUSTRIOS 4.0 has been available now for several months and contains advantageous functional improvements for many manufacturers.
  2. Workflow tasks: In the walk-the-talk department, IndustriOS Software uses INDUSTRIOS ERP to support its business processes. In the sales area, we started using workflow to standardize the communication and collaboration between sales, sales engineering, and accounting. The INDUSTRIOS workflow engine is highly configurable, and could be deployed with several phases or iterations. This is especially true if your organization has many quote types, subject to different action rules. Recently, workflow functionality has been added to other documents such as Sales Orders, Invoices and Credit Memos, Purchase Orders and Shipments, which could also be the object of continuous improvement efforts.
  3. Report Server scheduling: What better way to enforce the deployment of procedures than to get your system to automatically and regularly produce reports that support the procedure? I’ve heard that one of the keys to employee engagement is to communicate key information regularly. Report server is another highly configurable collaboration tool that can always benefit from a phase 2 deployment.

Check out two of our Finished Goods articles that relate to this topic:

  1. PlantGauge performance cards: Information is not power, it is leverage. The use of information is power.  If you’ve updated to recent versions of INDUSTRIOS you are aware of the inherent power of publishing performance cards. It alerts your team members to exceptions that prompt action. Late purchase orders, shipments expected this week, jobs due to finish this week, etc. The possibilities are endless. In times of slowdown, could you be revisiting how you currently use PlantGauge, and what more could you do with it?If you need inspiration, take advantage of our PlantInsights program. PlantInsights is an 11 part webinar series on how to use INDUSTRIOS to support decision making and actions. And don’t worry if some of the sessions have already occurred. All past sessions are recorded, posted to the site and available on demand. https://www.industrios.com/software/plantinsights
  2. Data integrity: You have to weed the garden. Customer and vendor contact information is constantly changing. Promotions, retirements, layoffs. If you don’t have a process to continually update the contact information in your system, you end up with digital weeds. What better time than now to dedicate some cycles to updating the contact information in INDUSTRIOS? It may also be a good time to implement or start capturing information that INDUSTRIOS can hold and that you may never have captured before. Remember, the single most important determinant of your sales and marketing campaigns is the quality of your list.
    Aside from the areas discussed above, keep in mind that there are many other areas where INDUSTRIOS ERP could take on additional loads and support more procedures. 
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