Aerospace
The aerospace industry is responsible for designing, manufacturing, operating and maintaining civil, military and dual-use aircraft (aircraft designed for commercial use that can also be modified for defense use), spacecraft and their respective parts such as engines, flight instruments and landing gears.
The aerospace industry relies heavily on electronics. Frequent advances in electronics bring about continual changes in the industry. CAD and CAM (Computer Aided Design and Manufacture) have brought about major changes in aircraft production and the time required for an operation has been cut; sometimes by more than half. Investment in R&D (Research and Development) has introduced new materials and advances in the understanding of aerodynamics. In turn, this has helped to improve the performance and efficiency of aircraft.
Industry Challenges
- Increasing global competition and consolidations or complex industrial alliances
- Dynamic, constantly changing and competitive market
- Need for customer management and continued reach
- Highly competitive and dynamic market that requires collaboration and cooperation between companies in the industry
- Need to control costs, while remaining flexible and responsive
- Provide higher quality of goods and services, more efficiently
- Need to shorten time to market
- Need to provide support for complex equipment maintenance, repair and overhaul
- Need for extensive fleet management capabilities
- Need to introduce and manage new technologies
- Need for extensive integrated supply chain due to complex supplier network
- Need to fully document the control and manage of products and processes
- Need to manage and control complex contracts and all associated projects
How BTP and SYSPRO Can Help
Engineering Change Control
The Engineering Change Control process is a user-definable workflow enterprise
sub-system. It can augment or even replace the paper trail that usually
accompanies any changes to product design data. By providing mechanisms, audit
trails and archives, Engineering Change Control functionality gives
manufacturers ready access to documentation on prior product versions. In this
manner, the manufacturer has the ability to address questions relating to
product defects in older product versions. Comprehensive ECC documentation also
enables manufacturers to easily revert to the production of prior product
versions, if necessary, to suit the requirements of a particular customer or
conform to regulatory requirements.
Engineering Change Orders enables users to:
- Assign product design tasks to particular users (or groups of users)
- Transfer tasks between users (or groups of users)
- Notify users of new tasks
- Remind users of outstanding tasks
- Sign off engineering changes electronically
Lot Traceability
The SYSPRO Lot Traceability module is designed to provide full traceability at transactional level for items which could cause loss of life or limb if conformance to quality standards is not adhered to. This enables you to maximize quality control through the tracking and replacement of any defective materials and manage product recalls efficiently and effectively. You can choose between numeric or alphanumeric lot numbering and if numeric, whether the numbers must be assigned manually or automatically.
Bill of Materials
The accuracy of your bills of material determines the efficiency and accuracy of your manufacturing costing, procurement, shop loading and ultimately, customer service. A bill of material in SYSPRO forms the basis for lead time calculations, material and capacity planning, factory documentation, shop floor control and manufacturing costing. The Bill of Materials module enables you to create and maintain a model of your manufactured or assembled products. You can construct quantity or percentage relationships between assemblies (final product), sub-assemblies (bulk batches) and components (raw materials) using up to 15 levels, and can assign each component (raw material) to a selected operation in the parent routing. You can model the routing (operations or method) of the product to accommodate varying size batches, milestone operations, progressive scrap and dynamic elapsed times. The routing can also include information on tooling, operator skill levels, operation instructions, testing requirements, etc. Full bill of material costing and what-if costing facilities are provided and you can implement product change control if you use the Bill of Materials module in conjunction with SYSPRO's Engineering Change Control module.
Product Configurator
The SYSPRO Product Configurator enables manufacturers to differentiate their product offerings through the ready customization of product to meet customer specifications. The Product Configurator module provides a rules-based configurator that will primarily help companies efficiently process products that are manufactured-to-order, assembled-to-order or sold in many configurations. It can also help reduce configuration errors, while reducing the involvement of experts in routine transactions.
Quotations
The Quotations module enables the entry and maintenance of quotations, the printing of free-format quotations and, upon confirmation of the quote by the client, the confirmation of the details into Work in Progress, Sales Orders and Requisitions/Purchase Orders.
When the quotation is accepted, it can be used to record a sales order and, where necessary, a chain of master and sub-jobs to support it. Purchase requisitions and purchase orders can be created for special bought-out items or when shortages exist for bought-out/sub-contract items anywhere in the Sales Order/Job chain.
Besides using the Quotations module for quoting, SYSPRO has a simplified quoting system that can be used within Sales Order Entry, called Quick Entry. You use the Quick Entry function to enter quotes in a rapid and effective manner without having to enter all the details associated with the entry of a normal order. It is ideally suited to a telesales environment, where speed of entry is important and the facility to enter a quote rather than an order is vital. The quote can be stored for retrieval at a later stage and then converted into an order for a specific customer.
Requirements Planning
The Requirements Planning module is the focus of the manufacturing and material resource planning system. It consists of four sections: Master Production Scheduling facilities, Rough-Cut Capacity and Resource Planning Net Requirements planning facilities for materials together with capacity planning for work centers and labor, Work orders and purchase order action. Features of this module include variable planning horizons, dynamic capacity profiling and load leveling. This is a bucketless system. The calculation is regenerative and infinite. This can be fed into Forward Finite Scheduling.
Blanket Sales Orders and Releases
The SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders and Releases module provides an effective method of setting up, tracking and reconciling Release System contracts and releases between Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) and their customers (particularly the Motoring Industry).
It enables the easy capture or import of a new release and provides the necessary tools to manipulate the release and advise the customer of what has been accepted or changed and why. It enables updating of existing scheduled orders automatically, and provides an audit trail of deliveries so that disputes over quantities supplied to date can be resolved. It also enables the various tasks to be split up so that the appropriate level of staff can be employed for each function.
Customer Relationship Management
The SYSPRO Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system lets users track and manage all customer and supplier touch points. Customer correspondence, status, vendor relationships, marketing campaigns, service issues, product returns, warranty and repair histories, quote and sales order information are monitored and recorded, providing a 360 degree view of internal or external business relationships. SYSPRO CRM enables sales, marketing and customer support operations to work collaboratively to achieve total customer satisfaction.
SYSPRO CRM enables manufacturers to increase revenues and client satisfaction through optimal client management. In addition it enables the manufacturer to decrease order cycle times and deliver product when required. Real time information in CRM enables you to proactively anticipate your client's requirements.
Finite Scheduling
SYSPRO provides strong, real-time finite capacity scheduling capability. In order to stay competitive, manufacturers must drive lean operations. The finite capacity capability enables manufacturers to use flexible, short-run, short-horizon scheduling, resulting in cost-effective production runs. Finite Capacity Scheduling creates realistic schedules and promise dates for customers, which increases profits by improving productivity and customer satisfaction, and reducing costs.
Work in Progress
The Work in Progress module enables you to accurately control costs of work orders currently in progress. Material usage and labor can be posted in real time and in batch mode. It also enables variance reporting to be produced between estimated costs and actual costs of each job. Work orders may be added for stocked items (with a bill of materials), stocked items without a bill of materials or non-stocked items. These work orders can create a bill of jobs for all relevant sub-assemblies down the BOM chain. Labor transactions can be posted through kit issues, manually or imported into the system from a data collection interface. Material allocations can be issued to a job through kit issues or manually and optionally allow for the substitution of a material allocation when performing kit issues.
Activity Based Costing
The SYSPRO Activity Based Costing (ABC) enables you to more accurately attribute overhead costs to specific products by associating elements of overhead cost to those products actually causing the cost burden and by enabling you to apply these costs at the points of transition in the procurement, manufacturing and sales cycles.
Assets Register
The Assets Register module enables companies to better manage and control their asset investment. An audit trail of all transactions is recorded and available for viewing in Asset query, together will all financial information flowing through to General Ledger, optionally defined by Branch, Group and Cost Center . The information contained in Assets Register can be output and/or integrated to the General Ledger or it can be run as a stand-alone module. Asset tracking is enabled through a number of additional fields such as location, responsible user, an asset count and labeling system and asset transfer program. Book and tax valuations, with a standard asset revaluation program are provided, as well as allowing 3 alternate valuations. Extensive security is available against functions and individual fields, to protect against unauthorized changing of financial data.
SYSPRO Reporting Services
SYSPRO Reporting Services is the next generation reporting tool that forms part of the SYSPRO Enterprise Reporting suite. It incorporates an embedded version of Crystal Reports XI to provide a single, cost-effective solution that simplifies operational effectiveness. You would use SYSPRO Reporting Services to design custom reports to virtually any level of complexity, complete with tailored reporting options, preferences and layout features such as graphs. You would also use it to share reports between users and companies, protect access to information and publish reports in multiple formats. SYSPRO Reporting Services enables you to produce professional-looking reports quickly and with minimal cost and effort. It enables you to significantly reduce the costs typically associated with the creation and design of reports as well as increase productivity by allowing for the scheduling of multiple reports that can be run simultaneously in the background. Cost savings are realized through the inclusion of built-in drivers (to bind to optimized SYSPRO e.net solutions business objects); report archiving (reduces the consumption of office stationery); quicker development time (no need for external report designers); and protection from changes in technology upgrades (no more re-engineering of existing reports with each new version). SYSPRO Reporting Services is based on the .NET framework, and has support for Windows and UNIX. Standard SYSPRO e.net solutions Query Business Objects are used to interrogate the information from the SYSPRO database and XML messaging is used to communicate between the client and server of SYSPRO Reporting Services.