The Backbone of Infor VISUAL: The Manufacturing Window

Some background before we begin

Infor VISUAL ERP is a solution built for small to mid-market manufacturing companies. The primary customer for VISUAL ERP is organizations that use a work order to produce their product, as opposed to those in a highly repetitive or process manufacturing environment. These work-order-based companies could be make-to-order, configure-to-order, make-to-stock, engineer-to-order, or a combination of all of these.

I have been representing the Infor VISUAL ERP product for close to 20 years, and whenever a manufacturing company decides to purchase and implement VISUAL to run their business, they are usually making that decision based on the functionality contained in the Manufacturing Window.

What is the manufacturing window?

Simply put, the Manufacturing Window is where you tell Infor VISUAL ERP how you make your product. We refer to the Manufacturing Window as the “backbone” of VISUAL because so many things in the organization are driven and affected by the information stored here.

More specifically, the Manufacturing Window is where you input everything that is needed to produce a finished good: raw materials, operations, resources, subassemblies, and outside services. By giving the system this information, you are putting yourself in a position to understand your costs to produce a good (including labor, materials, burden, and outside services), as well as your capacity, so that you can schedule properly.

The Manufacturing Window:

• Shows where an order stands in its process, keeping everyone in the loop on the status.
• Answers the question of, “When can you ship this?” at order entry, helping your customer service team give accurate promise dates to customers, and helping your manufacturing team create a realistic execution schedule.
• Offers several “views” that allow users to see items in a text, grid, or graphical format, which makes adoption easy.
• Includes a variety of productivity tools to allow users to configure alternate materials for when there may be shortages, or see more information in “view panels” that automatically update with data directly related to the information in the Manufacturing Window.
• Displays real-time actual costs, as well as projected costs on a particular work order.
• Tells users what material shortages are occurring, along with who has worked on that particular work order, and for how long.

The Manufacturing Window is the backbone of Infor VISUAL ERP because the work order is the backbone of all of our customers.

In conclusion

If your company manages work orders, then you should take a look at Infor VISUAL ERP. It has a track record of 25+ years supporting manufacturing companies with a robust set of no-nonsense tools to help manage your business better. If you would like more details, you can view a demo here.

This free e-book may help you make a decision about which ERP to select.

Most companies don’t evaluate ERP on a regular basis. If you are looking for ERP and not sure where to start, how about talking to an expert who is not a sales person? Click here to learn more about Jack Shannon, President of Visual South, and sign up for a free phone consultation to discuss your situation.