ERP Requirements for Rubber and Plastics Manufacturing

As plastics production continues its growth trajectory, manufacturers are under greater pressure to stand out from the competition, keep up with industry trends and meet customer demands. Manual processes, spreadsheets and sticky notes don’t fit the bill for today’s rubber and plastics manufacturers. With enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, businesses gain greater control over operations to boost their bottom line.  

Epicor ERP is a strong fit for plastics and rubber manufacturers. Epicor supports nuanced business processes and provides industry-specific features to drive critical improvements. Below, we explain how Epicor satisfies three of the major ERP requirements for rubber and plastics manufacturing.  

Shop Floor Visibility 

Rubber and plastics manufacturing involves a large range of equipment. Maintaining full visibility into your machinery and shop floor processes is an essential capability of ERP software. With Epicor, you can deeply integrate your ERP solution with the Advanced MES (Mattec) module to monitor your factory floor at all times. 

By delivering real-time performance data into your ERP solution, Advanced MES provides automatic production monitoring to give you an accurate view of your manufacturing processes and assets. Precise metrics—such as OEE, run rates, scrap and yield—allow you to make fast decisions to cut waste, improve efficiency and eliminate downtime. Additionally, SPC and SQC conduct statistical analysis without any expertise on your end, automatically creating intuitive graphs and charts that will give you detailed insights into production processes.  

Epicor ERP now provides even more visibility after adding IoT functionality. Epicor IoT monitors your equipment and inventory locations, collecting real-time data accessible through a user-friendly dashboard. You can instantly view your assets to detect issues, schedule preventative maintenance and make other decisions to keep operations running smoothly.  

Quality Assurance 

Rubber and plastics manufacturing includes multiple stages, from creating the primary plastic form to producing the final polymer. If you manage quality manually, you’re liable to make critical errors that detriment the product and customer relationships. Epicor ERP automates quality management, helping you maintain precision and efficiency throughout the supply chain.  

Epicor ties together all your quality functions in one place, allowing you to record and track products and materials from cradle to grave. From a simple interface, inspectors can access queues of items to inspect, flag parts for review, scrap end parts and perform any task necessary to ensure your goods are up to par. Epicor also delivers real-time updates on inbound shipment inspections and tracks suppliers, so you’re only ordering quality parts and materials before beginning production.  

Additionally, plastics manufacturers develop products for other industries, such as the automotive and medical device sectors. That means plastics manufacturers must ensure their products are compliant with industry standards. Epicor provides detailed audit trails and automatically checks for certificates of compliance to simplify compliance. It also supports a range of industry standards, including automotive (TS), aerospace (AS) and FDA regulations.  

Production Control 

Across the board, manufacturing sectors are experiencing increasingly complex supply chains. This is perhaps most true for rubber and plastics manufacturers. Customers expect plastics manufacturers to develop a large variety of intricate, tailored products. An ERP solution must be equipped to handle the challenges of family molding and growing customer expectations.  

Epicor enables manufacturers to manage processes and products of various degrees of complexity. Its project management module gives you complete control of any project, providing detailed estimations, planning, scheduling, costing and logistics. For complicated products, users can manage a multi-level bill of materials (BOM), bill of operations (BOO) and assemblies within a single engineering structure. This enables engineers to visually confirm components and perform accurate costing and scheduling.  

Epicor includes other features to simplify engineering processes. The intuitive product configurator enables on-the-fly configuration and automatically creates BOMs, routings and part numbers. Full integration with CAD systems helps manufacturers strengthen engineering workflows and design products. Epicor gives you end-to-end production control to manage nuanced manufacturing processes and customer needs while maximizing throughput and reducing waste.  

Wrap Up  

Epicor ERP serves as a strong framework for plastics and rubber manufacturing. For over 45 years, Epicor has delivered 360-degree visibility, quality assurance and production control to support multiple manufacturing and distribution industries. 

At Datix, we’ll help you capitalize on Epicor’s powerful capabilities to optimize your business. We’re an Epicor Gold Partner with over 20 years of experience in multiple manufacturing and distribution environments. Our certified consultants will work with you from start to finish to ensure you have all the ERP tools in place to fuel business growth. 

Make sure your software aligns with industry demands. To learn more about our ERP solutions and services, reach out to one of our experts today!