Generic Vs Specialty ERP Products for Engineer To Order Industry - What Oracle can deliver for this Industry?
Engineer To Order (ETO) Manufacturers typically make complex products with longer lead time whose customer specifications require unique engineering design, significant customization or new purchased materials. Each customer order may result in a unique set of part numbers, bills of material & routings and each order needs to be tracked as a project throughout the Sales, Engineering, Manufacturing, Shipping, Installation and Service life cycle. This industry typically comprises of customers in Aerospace, Defense, Construction, Tool and Industrial equipment manufacturers etc.
In automating the ETO processes, most of the ERP products find it difficult to address the unique requirements and challenges in this industry. Some of the unique requirements in this industry are listed below.
1. Tight integration between Sales, Engineering, Manufacturing and Project management
2. Configurator and Pricing support to Sales/Engineering teams for accurate Quoting
3. Managing frequent engineering changes
4. Capturing engineering expenditure and Allocation of indirect costs
5. Managing close supplier collaboration
6. Purchasing and Tracking inventory directly for a project
7. Actual cost and profit tracking by project against budgets
8. Progress billing and Revenue recognition to meet accounting standards
9. Managing Installation and After market services
10. Support for Project WBS and Status tracking across execution phases
There are few tier2 ERP vendors like Glovia, Encompix, Cincom, IFS etc addressing to the specific needs of this industry with some good features. But the critical requirement of achieving the end to end integrations across departments and processes is very difficult to meet by specialty product vendors and it posts a significant risk for the buyers to integrate multiple independent systems. This is where Oracle scores over other ERP products by offering a completely integrated project management and supply chain ETO solution.
Oracle EBS suite offers a complete to end solution to this industry by integrating its products like Projects, Manufacturing, Planning, Quoting, Order management, Purchasing, Financials, CRM etc. Over the period, Oracle has also augmented its offering to this industry with some unique features like Seiban support, Model/Unit effectivity, PJM portal, Project hard pegging, Task auto assignment etc.
In this ETO series, we will discuss and share the details about what Oracle offers to ETO industry and how it addresses these requirements and challenges.
