As a manufacturing business leader, you know that critical manufacturing metrics go beyond the factory floor. Tracking the complex pieces of any manufacturing operation in a meaningful way takes a tool that is up for the challenge.

As manufacturers make the move to the cloud, solutions like NetSuite’s cloud-native ERP provide a significant competitive advantage in staying up to date on the data that matters to make the right strategic moves for your business and improve its business KPIs.

Whether it’s day-to-day tactics on the shop floor, maximizing inventory management, or implementing strategic shifts in the front office, having the right, reliable data to back you up and measure your performance is key.

But an investment in NetSuite doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be using this tool and the valuable data it’s tracking to its fullest. Truly capitalizing on this tool and all its offerings means going beyond “factory settings” to personalize and optimize it throughout all of your business’ key processes, including:

Supply Chain Management

The manufacturing supply chain is an intricate system of many processes and pieces of data sets that need to inform each and every step of the process from sourcing to production on the factory floor to balancing supply and demand through inventory and orders and shipping. And that’s before you even begin to consider the customer side of things. Here are just a few pieces to closely monitor and optimize for strategic supply chain management:

• Track parts, materials availability, costs, and quality reports from suppliers to streamline inventory carrying costs.
• Measure equipment and worker productivity and efficiency, track and correct production bottlenecks (and more) to improve production efficiency.
• Manage and balance inventory levels based on orders and forecasts.

Operations Management

Of course, the production side of things isn’t the only piece of the reporting puzzle for manufacturers. Strong data-driven financials and insightful reporting is equally as integral to successful business operations. Manufacturers gain a competitive edge when they make operational metrics a priority including:

• Tracking standard financial metrics as well as everything from cost of materials to the value streams of individual production units to improve revenue recognition, compliance support and accounting staff productivity and reduce time to close the books and general ledger consolidation.
• Providing accurate, real-time reporting across your whole organization — from the finance team to factory-floor supervisors spanning the full range of relevant operations, to providing 360 degree visibility and actionable insights.

Managing NetSuite

With all of those pieces relying on your NetSuite solution, it goes without saying that ensuring that your NetSuite solution is performing at its best is essential. Some organizations are able to have an in-house, full-time employee dedicated to the optimization of this vital technology. However, for many startups and mid-sized businesses, that’s simply not an option.

Too often this results in the task of ERP management falling on whoever has the most experience and the most time. Unfortunately that person does not always have the expertise to truly capitalize on all of the opportunities NetSuite offers. It may be viewed as “good enough”, but there are better management options out there.

This technology is too important to the success of your manufacturing operation to leave to “good enough.” If you don’t have the bandwidth, budget, or resources to hire a full-time employee, partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) could be the right fit for you. With an MSP you get a whole team of qualified experts 24/7/365, making sure your solution is doing everything it can for your business.

Learn more about optimizing your NetSuite solution for manufacturing today in this complimentary eBook.