Tag: Material Resource Planning

Streamlining Inventory with Material Requirements Planning
Total Inventory and Production Control with SapphireOne MRP

SapphireOne Material Requirements Planning (MRP) gives you complete visibility and control over your inventory and production processes. With built-in forecasting and historical analysis, MRP helps businesses control inventory levels, enhance production efficiency, reduce costs, and plan confidently for the future.

What Is Material Requirements Planning?

Material Requirements Planning (MRP), sometimes referred to as Material Resource Planning, is a production planning, scheduling, and inventory control system designed to improve productivity within manufacturing and distribution environments.

At its core, MRP is designed to answer three fundamental business questions:
- What is needed?
- How much is needed?
- When is it needed?
By answering these questions accurately, businesses can avoid overstocking, minimise shortages, and align production with demand.

How Material Requirements Planning Works

MRP works backwards from a production plan for finished goods. This plan is converted into detailed requirements for:
- Sub-assemblies
- Component parts
- Raw materials
All requirements are scheduled to ensure the final product can be delivered within the required timeframe.

Without proper resource planning, businesses often struggle with:
- Excess inventory holding costs
- Production delays
- Missed or unfulfilled customer orders
Effective MRP removes these inefficiencies by aligning inventory, production, and demand.

Components of SapphireOne Material Requirements Planning

SapphireOne’s Inventory Management module includes a fully integrated MRP feature that allows resource planning to be managed directly within the ERP system.

SapphireOne’s MRP functionality is built around two core capabilities:
1. Historical Usage Analysis
  - Track, adjust, and analyse historical inventory usage
  - Review usage data across the past 2, 3, or 4 years
  - Identify trends, seasonality, and anomalies in demand
2. Forward Forecasting
  - Forecast future material requirements up to 2.5 years ahead
  - Calculations are driven by historical usage data
  - Forecasts update dynamically as data is adjusted
Key Features of the SapphireOne MRP Forecasting Tool

The Forecasting tool allows businesses to model future inventory requirements with precision and flexibility.

Key features include:
- Forecast material requirements up to 2.5 years in advance
- Fully adjustable forecasting values that automatically recalculate when changed
- Ability to account for unexpected events by modifying forecast inputs
- Support for multiple planning variants, including:
  - Minimum and maximum inventory levels
  - Fixed Order Quantities (FOQ)
  - Supplier lead times
- Editable forecast lines (highlighted in blue) for tailored planning
- One-click Save & Recalculate to generate updated forecasts
- Forecasting available for total inventory or individual inventory items
MRP Usage History Tool

The Usage History tool provides insight into past inventory behaviour and directly influences future forecasts.

Key capabilities include:
- Record and review historical usage for 2, 3, or 4 years
- Interactive usage graph that can be manually adjusted
- Blue data points can be moved to reflect corrected or exceptional historical periods
- Automatic recalculation of future forecasts based on adjusted historical data
- Analysis available for total inventory or specific inventory items
Benefits of the SapphireOne MRP Tool

Inventory Control
- Ensure materials are available when needed
- Track stock on hand accurately
- Minimise excess inventory
- Plan future material requirements with confidence
Cost Reduction
- Reduce holding and storage costs
- Improve purchasing efficiency
- Maintain a steady and predictable inventory flow
Enhanced Scheduling
- Allocate production time efficiently across products
- Achieve economic order quantities consistently
Production Optimisation
- Ensure the right materials are available in the right quantities at the right time
- Reduce waste and downtime
- Improve utilisation of equipment and labour
Improved Supplier Relationships
- Align demand planning with supplier capacity
- Improve transparency and communication
- Create more reliable purchasing and delivery schedules
Future Planning
- Use historical sales and usage data to support informed forecasting
- Save time, resources, and costs through better planning decisions
A step-by-step video walkthrough is available, demonstrating how to use the SapphireOne MRP tool and how it can improve inventory and production processes.

As always, if you have any questions about how our Inventory Management functionality and MRP feature can help your business, please do not hesitate to get in touch or book a demo with a member of our team. We’re always here to help!
November 6, 2020
Take Your Business Enterprise to the Next Level with World-Class Accounting ERP Innovation
Innovation in the Enterprise Resource Planning – ERP Application world is a very mature marketplace.

Some of the ERP vendors have been developing their applications for close to forty years, so true world class ground-breaking innovation development in these mature markets are rare and seldom. SapphireOne ERP Accounting provides Top 10 innovations in ERP.

Top 10 Innovations in ERP Application market
Document Management System (DMS)

An ERP application with document managing capabilities grants you the ability to conveniently sort and manage vast caches of transaction documents with ease in the shortest time possible. No longer will time be spent on unproductive activities like document filing and searching, the document management system will do all these in real-time.

Not only do you reduce running costs through decreased expenditure on paper and other stationery, your employees can focus on other more productive tasks. By reducing your paper consumption you’re also making your business eco-friendly.

A document management system allows you to implement a stratified documents and sensitive information access protocol. With this framework in place, you can effectively specify and monitor who has access to the documents.

HTML Web Server in A Client/Server application

SapphireOne provides a Web Pack solution with Top 10 innovations in ERP. This is a HTML webserver in-built into SapphireOne server which allows the ability to do data entry, client lookup, vendor look up and other functions from any device that supports a browser such as iPads, iPhones etc. SapphireOne Web Pack also provides the ability to set up and run unlimited Point of Sale (POS) web based stores.

Softphone Integration CRM

A Softphone is a software phone that enable users to call any telephone number without a physical telephone. The Softphone works in many ways such as Computer to Computer or phone to phone where VoIP telephone & adapter is required. Softphone is the bridge between VoIP network and telephone line or mobile network. It enables users to make a call between computer to a phone network and phone network to computer, when you have a dedicated number to receiver call.

The biggest benefit of having a Softphone is you can call any employee, client or supplier without having to worry about software matchup or whether or not they are online. It is a perfect solution for remote employees. A significant part of SapphireOne’s functionality is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Inside SapphireOne CRM package, Softphone has been fully integrated into all aspects of the SapphireOne application. Whether you are calling clients, vendors, employees, or other contacts, all this can be driven from a single click on the softphone icon. This instantly keeps a date & time stamp with the ability to record the call. This built-in functionality can bring immense advantages in managing relationship with vendors, clients and employees.

EDI/API Integration

To manage orders and pay vendors on time, large organisations use electronic data interchange (EDI). EDI decreases the order-to-cash cycle time, i.e. suppliers to retailers get paid faster. This helps to maximise efficiency and minimise errors. EDI improves speed, accuracy, security and trade communication. More than just a data format, EDI is a system or method for exchanging business documents with external entities and integrating the data from those documents into your internal systems. Without EDI capabilities, a business has a greater risk of revenue loss from chargeback penalties, loss of opportunity to the processing delay, loss of reputation and credit with customers.

SPS Commerce’s fulfilment EDI has hundreds of document types covering most transaction types that are commonly used among vendors and suppliers. With a singular focus on the retail marketplace, SPS commerce has revolutionised traditional EDI systems, by developing a model that is the most cost-effective and reliable in the industry.

Barcode Scanning

Data synchronisation in the core ERP application is the biggest concern in Warehouse management or Inventory Management business. Barcode scanners automate the process of inventory management and stock control process. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and checklist evaluation process.

Barcode scanners are usually used to sell the product or to make inventory of the selected product. Scanner will help you to record all the information about the product and thus, streamlines the inventory management process. With Sapphire WebPack Solution all inventory management processes will be available out of the box, and there is no need to separately integrate ERP and barcode scanners.

Material Resource Planning MRP

Material Resource Planning (MRP) is a computer based inventory management system. MRP generates time-based manufacturing and purchasing plans for optimal inventory availability which is tied to historical data of customer demands. MRP is a subset of ERP for managing manufacturing requirements using integrated production planning and inventory controls. The main theme of MRP software is to “get the materials to the right place at the right time”. In any inventory management, regardless of the level of sophisticated technology used, the Saw Tooth pattern is followed. In this pattern there is a certain amount of inventory that you start with, then you consume it, stock levels drop, you reorder the stock, you receive this stock and the process continues.

SapphireOne ERP Application Dashboard

The ERP application Dashboard goes by many names. You most likely would have heard them being called Business Intelligences (BI) or Performance Indicator Dashboards. Regardless of the name, these features do one thing – present business statistics and performance indicators in a visually attractive and graphically intuitive interface. The SapphireOne ERP dashboard utilises graphs, bar charts and other visually engaging design elements that provide a succinct overview of a business’s financial standings.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) & Standard Business Reporting (SBR2)

From 1 July 2018, it is compulsory for all businesses with over 20 employees to report to the ATO after each pay event.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) aligns your reporting obligations of your payroll processes. The information you send the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will include your employees’ salaries and wages, allowances, deductions (for example, workplace giving) and other payments, pay as you go (PAYG) withholding and superannuation information. SapphireOne is fully integrated with STP.

Standard Business reporting (SBR2) allows you to access and download your Business Activity Statement (BAS) directly from the ATO. This function can prefill the form with your BAS document number and other relevant fields.

PDF capture

The task of processing supplier invoices includes sorting documents, manual data entry and archiving the paperwork, this can be time consuming and inefficient. With SapphireOne PDF capture these negative effects can be easily avoided. SapphireOne uses the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in PDF capture function that takes a paper document, usually an invoice, scans and “reads” it and turns it into metadata that can be used to populate fields in a database.

SapphireOne’s PDF capture function can help you streamline daily accounting tasks. Currently, few vendor invoices are processed through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which means that majority of vendor invoices are still received as PDF documents or paper. This makes the processing of capturing the data from a vendor invoice slow and inefficient. Mistakes in classification and data entry lead to late payments, missed discounts, deteriorating relationships with suppliers and cost overrides.

Material Safety Data Sheets

Any organisation or enterprise that is storing products as simple as food, motor vehicle fuel, and farm fertiliser, to dangerous products such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, radioactive or explosive materials require Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS).

SapphireOne inventory has integrated MSDS into the Inventory module which offers 30 unique alphanumeric fields, 10 unique numeric fields and 10 unique date fields which are fully customisable.
June 12, 2018