Mill Products Requirements

The Mill Products segment is made up of companies from various industries. Some companies produce individual discrete components and finished goods, like valves, screws, or plastic products. Other companies mix materials to create batches of standardized end products, like pulp, asphalt or cement/concrete. The final group of companies are those who convert raw natural, artificial, or scrap materials into dimensional products. This includes converting ore into primary metal, recycled paper into packaging, or cotton/polyester chips into textile rolls.

Company processes in the mill products industries span the spectrum of simple to highly complex. Some companies only need an MRP and infinite scheduling. Others can require specialty software specific to an industry processes, like characteristic-base planning or industry MES.

Common requirements include:

§ Booking sales orders, promising delivery dates, shipping and billing

§ Running material requirement planning – MRP

§ Planning and scheduling production

§ Asset Management and planning

§ Sourcing and procurement of materials

§ Defining products in batches, serial numbers, variants

§ Executing production, or integration to 3rd party MES

§ Tracking inventory, warehousing, shipping and receiving

§ Planning and controlling core finance including closing

§ Managing human resources

§ Opening visibility into operations through analytics and reporting

Sometimes companies require:

§ Batch management

§ Repetitive manufacturing

§ Process manufacturing and associated processes

§ Trim and cutting processes

§ Handling of commodities in finance and logistics

§ Transportation and warehouse planning and execution, including bulk

Occasionally companies require:

Support for continuous processing strategies, optimization of investment in production assets, and often deal with rolled goods. As they provide products to be used further down the supply chain, quality (tracking), product genealogy, adherence to service level agreements, and optimization in logistics are critical. Some segments require ISVs provide very specialized solutions and optimizers. Mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs are frequent.

§ Focus on production efficiency

§ Complexity of their characteristic-based products

§ Delivery date at the time of sales orders considering production capacities

§ High levels of asset availability

§ Visibility into cost of production and logistics