Producing and shipping high quality products at a reasonable price is the only way a manufacturer can remain in business. Gone are the days of “good enough” or “we compete on price, not quality”, manufacturers are being held to increasingly higher standards of quality by their competitors. Much of the credit for this goes to W. Edwards Deming, often regarded as the “father of Statistical Quality Control” based mainly on his early work in postwar Japan and who was widely regarded as a hero in Japan for his emphasis on statistics as a tool for improving quality in manufacturing. Statistical Quality Control (SQC) and Statistical Process Control (SPC) are the lifeblood of a manufacturing company that seeks to measure and capture data about their products and to monitor the production process to ensure high quality standards.

By now most, if not all, of you have heard of the Epicor Product Configurator and some of you may be very familiar with it. For those of you who are not that familiar with the Configurator here is a brief list of things that it can do: Automate the part configuration, engineering, or quoting process. This is crucial during the sales process to ensure the customers get what they need. Generate “intelligent” part numbers and descriptions. These can be catalog part numbers or “one off” parts created for a single quote or sales order. Generate a Bill of Material and Routing to assist in developing product costs. Prevent invalid configurations and combinations of options. The Configurator does this by capturing the knowledge of your engineering and design staff and placing it into the Epicor database, and then applying that knowledge during the sales process.

Not a day goes by in the life of a manufacturing professional that we don’t hear the term Material Requirements Planning, or its more common abbreviation MRP. We are all familiar with the term, and what it means, but how well do we really understand the inner workings of the tool? Before MRP, most manufacturing companies relied on what was referred to as the “order launch and expedite” system, whereby work orders were released to the floor based on upcoming shipments and expediters worked their magic to get the orders done on time. This led to great inefficiencies in material procurement and resource usage, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice.