4 Ways to Take Your Manufacturing Business to the Next Level

Whether it was inventory control, lack of skilled workers or shifting supplier bases, manufacturers were already facing enough challenges before the pandemic disrupted everything. 

With ongoing issues, such as supply chain and cash flow, only getting worse by this unprecedented year, how can you get solutions to these problems and ultimately take your operation to the next level?   

Let’s first touch on the current reality of the manufacturing industry. 

According to the manufacturing institute, most small- to mid-size manufacturers expect to continue struggling to identify talent in 2021 and beyond. Most companies are forced to make technological investments at their businesses to achieve cost efficiencies in production, and almost half are re-evaluating their supply chain, often with an eye towards accelerating automation in operations.

At Certum Solutions, one of our specialties is helping manufacturing clients find solutions to these and other issues. For instance, we recently helped an enterprise wireless and mobility solutions provider that served companies across North America. Their existing solution was unable to integrate critical third-party applications for managing sales tax, time tracking, payroll and payments. Their warehouse management was becoming time-consuming and inefficient, and their inventory software couldn’t differentiate drop-shipped items.

Chances are, this sounds all too familiar - it’s something we see all the time at our firm. So, what solution do we provide to help?

First, we know that there’s no way to move forward today without the best technology. Typically, we take a manufacturer’s major team members through a comprehensive assessment, analyzing every screen in their workflow, highlighting capabilities of alternative software solutions and detailing their impact on real-life user scenarios. Our firm has found the QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop suite to be a great help to manufacturing clients.

With this in mind, let’s look at four of the best tactics and tools for growing your manufacturing business.

Let’s look at four of the best tactics and tools to grow a manufacturing business.

1. Make best use of your people

Manufacturing, like most industries, finds itself trying to do more with less. The key for manufacturers: Realizing what tool will work best at each stage of development.

The first step in taking your operation to the next level is the ability to scale. You can’t grow if your operations can’t keep up. We use QuickBooks Enterprise because it facilitates the ability to scale the number of users who can all work at the same time. It also lets you assign appropriate user permission, so that staff only has access to the data they need.

That’s just one example of how the right tool, applied correctly, can help – in this case, by making sure you consistently make the best possible use of your people.

2. Control your workflow and inventory

Going hand in hand with efficient use of your workers is payroll, inventory and workflow. Again, let’s see how our solutions tackle issues in these areas.

Payroll, for instance, is fully integrated into QuickBooks. This means manufacturing clients can dispense with spreadsheets and double-entry  because bookkeeping and payroll data is in the same place. Manufacturers can also use this tool to pay employees with printed checks, direct deposit or both. One of our favorite features for our clients is QuickBooks Assisted Payroll, where  we can manage your federal and state payroll taxes and filings.

QuickBooks Advanced Inventory similarly helps our manufacturing clients automate inventory and order management systems. We can use end-to-end pick, pack and ship functionality to streamline the entire sales order fulfillment from one central dashboard. We also use the QuickBooks Advanced Reporting feature with more than 200 built-in, customizable reports that we can tailor to many different industries, including manufacturing. QuickBooks Point of Sale v19 is a new hub that allows manufacturers to sync with multiple sales channels and helps keep inventory counts fully up-to-date.

3. Go paperless

We’ve all been hearing it for years, but it remains true: Cutting down on paper can save an organization a lot. It’s also a big plus of the whole QuickBooks Enterprise suite. With advanced technology such as QuickBooks Enterprise, you’re able to cut paper and enjoy other benefits. For example, your factory can quickly realize savings in file storage costs, incur less liability with better  document security and backup, and save time with easier access to data. It can also help your operation’s brand by decreasing your carbon footprint.

4. Follow the money

For a manufacturer – or any other business for that matter – cash flow is at the very top of the list of needs. Our manufacturing clients have said that tracking cash flow as quickly as possible is vital, and will only become more important in the future.

QuickBooks Enterprise helps manufacturers get a better understanding of cash flow with customizable reports and projections. How so? QuickBooks Enterprise automatically updates and sends payments directly to your bank, and Advanced Pricing lets you control, customize and automate pricing to save time – and prevent errors.

QuickBooks will not only identify your customers with upcoming or overdue invoices, but also break down your suppliers by how much you spend with each.

For the solutions-provider client we mentioned before, the ability to employ QuickBooks Payments and integrate QuickBooks Time and Avalara generated big wins, as did knowing that a robust marketplace of third-party integrations would help the client grow and expand without changing accounting systems.

Simply put, you can’t grow your operations without technology and the right help. Make sure you pick the best of both for what you need now and in the future.