The cornerstone of every manufacturer’s success is the ability to shift gears from one product generation and business model to the next while finding new ways to excel at quality. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems enable manufacturing firms to scale the production of identical or similar products quickly. Traditionally, these systems have been designed to enforce consistency at the product level. However, ERP systems are struggling to keep pace with today’s era of mass customization and the growing customer demand for products that deliver experiences via embedded intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and contextual artificial intelligence (AI).
Often product quality challenges are the first symptoms of an ERP system not scaling to support current and future generations. When product quality and the audits tracking production start to show degradations in yield rates, a good place to look for causes is in a legacy or homegrown ERP system. Too often, these solutions cause more quality problems than they solve because years of software customization have resulted in an inflexibility to change. Moreover, many older ERP systems were designed for production consistency at the expense of meeting the higher quality standards that more complex, configurable, build-to-order products require.