How Does CPQ Help Manufacturers Plan?
What Does Manufacturers Care About?
Many in charge of industrial operations must balance several competing demands. A few explanations follow.
- Minimizing idle time vs reducing the time it takes to manufacture each object
- Keeping parts and components on hand when they’re needed vs reducing inventory costs
- Assuring a continuous flow of jobs through the manufacturing chain while eliminating bottlenecks and backlogs at labor-intensive stages
- Producing high-quality, error-free goods for customers, thus lowering the unit cost of items manufactured
- Growing manufacturing consistency allows various goods and models to be manufactured on the same line while reducing the amount of retooling needed for different products.
How Will CPQ Assist Manufacturers in Planning?
Idle and production time should be kept to a minimum.
Production managers keep a close eye on the amount and form of work piling up in their production queues. In some instances, this review includes revenue projections and pipeline updates from the sales department. The planning process is hampered if such results are inaccurate, either due to unwarranted expectation or sandbagging.
Managers are attempting to determine how many units they will need to manufacture in the coming month or fifth and how many working shifts they will need to achieve that target. They may also be determining how many changes a day are more effective in terms of increasing capacity versus lowering labour costs associated with three-shift operations.
Interest peaks and valleys can occur in most trading periods associated with individual goods. Special deals, end-of-year discounts, and publicity strategies will help balance out the operation over time, smoothing out the peaks and valleys and making for a more stable production schedule. CPQ and CRM are valuable instruments for promoting and supplying reliable forecasting information to planners allocating capital to achieve such output targets.
Controlling inventory costs and ensuring component and inventory availability
CPQ and CRM have a wealth of information about upcoming production needs. Managers may use CPQ to see what objects are currently in the investigation, setup, or suggestion stages.
This serves as an “early warning” for inventory changes, production preparation, and scheduling. This information will be used further up the supply chain to ensure that externally supplied components and services are still in the order queue.
Without Choke Points, Continuous Production Flow
Load balancing is the method of determining which services are required when and when during the manufacturing process. The whole procedure must be slower than the slowest stage of the manufacturing process. Adding capacity at specific points in the production chain to fix backlogs will help the production line’s overall throughput.
This method can be aided by CPQ, which can distinguish different assemblies and subassemblies used in several items. Planners may use demand history for such goods to predict demand. Through allocating idle space for this purpose, such groups may be installed in advance and stored onsite without raising inventory costs.
Concerns Over Consistency
CPQ has a direct effect on returns because of rework. Interactive consumer inputs drive the product configuration procedure. This means no mistakes in the ordering process and no mistakes in the manufacturing process. Customers should not refund goods that have been appropriately designed the first time around.
CPQ assists in achieving high output flexibility and reducing retooling downtime. Because of the advanced experience of product demand, work preparation may be done faster, allowing for a wider variety of product diversity on the same line.
Manufacturing Output CPQ Value to “Makers”
Makers benefit from CPQ because it improves their ability to schedule supply and gain early insight into future product demand. More extended schedule views and more precise inventory criteria lower costs and improve output efficiency.
