Manufacturing companies using Acumatica manufacturing as their ERP system can mitigate the challenges of managing their complex operations and supply chains to produce finished goods efficiently and cost-effectively.
This guide describes Acumatica ERP, ways to solve manufacturing challenges, the specialized Acumatica Manufacturing Edition, and how Acumatica ERP add-ons, including AP automation, help you scale business processes efficiently to achieve cost savings with increased functionality and controls.
A Brief Overview of Acumatica
The Acumatica Cloud ERP system provides functional module applications for customers in many industries. Acumatica Industry Editions include manufacturing, distribution, construction, retail, service industries, and general business. Acumatica ERP provides a multi-entity accounting and intercompany accounting solution for global companies.
Acumatica’s pricing model is unique because it allows unlimited users for the same cost. Pricing depends on the number of Acumatica applications implemented by customers, resource consumption by transaction volume and data storage, and the Acumatica license deployment option.
Unique ERP Challenges Faced by Manufacturing Businesses
Manufacturing businesses face ERP challenges to meet their goals of providing quality products to their global customers on time without experiencing costly production delays. Production must minimize rework and scrap materials resulting from errors. Subsidiaries, factories, and distribution may be globally located, which requires handling the complexities of multi-entity corporations.
The manufacturing department depends on the engineering department’s up-to-date bill of materials support for parts required to build finished goods. It needs to use complex manufacturing resource planning (MRP) and scheduling, with parts availability and ordering based on EOQ (economic order quantity).
Manufacturing methods vary from standard work orders to custom orders or continuous process manufacturing. Quality control is essential.
Cost accounting may include standard inventory, labor, and overhead costing to calculate manufacturing variances and other costing methods, such as average cost, which approximates GAAP inventory flows, using methods like FIFO (first-in-first-out).
Manufacturers interact with engineering for R&D of new or improved products. They order inventory parts and supplies through procurement and pay numerous global suppliers through accounts payable and warehouse inventory. They pick parts from their warehouses using system-based bills of materials and fulfill customer sales orders.
Manufacturing and accounting must properly control inventory with physical safeguards, effective ordering, and forecast demand insights to reduce inventory loss, theft, and obsolescence of stocked parts and products. They also take and reconcile annual physical inventory counts and periodic sample inventory cycle counts.
How Acumatica Helps Solve Manufacturing ERP Challenges
Acumatica for manufacturing helps solve ERP challenges by providing many of the software tools manufacturers need to manage their unique business processes in a specialized industry edition. Acumatica Manufacturing Edition is one of the best manufacturing ERP solutions.
Ready to expand your Acumatica ERP capabilities?
AP automation integration extends Acumatica ERP’s capabilities for supplier invoice processing in data-intensive accounts payable. The efficiency of AP automation helps your business reduce accounts payable hiring needs and close the books faster with real-time automatic global payment reconciliation.
Acumatica Manufacturing Management Overview
Acumatica manufacturing ERP software provides specialized capabilities geared to manufacturing companies with multi-site capabilities.
Acumatica Manufacturing Setup Guidance
The company provides online instructions for Acumatica manufacturing implementation that include system preparation, an implementation checklist, and detailed instructions for different components of the Acumatica manufacturing ERP. As part of this process, your company will set up its work centers configuration and production order types, including regular, planning, and disassembly, using Acumatica’s help instructions.
Applications for Acumatica Manufacturing Edition
Your manufacturing company can access these applications from Acumatica that are included in the Acumatica Manufacturing Edition for manufacturing, distribution, finance, and business intelligence. You can also select Acumatica CRM and other applications that a manufacturing company may need.
Manufacturing Methods
Acumatica Manufacturing Edition is designed to handle these manufacturing methods to fit each manufacturer’s unique needs:
- Make-to-stock
- Make-to-order
- Engineer-to-order
- Project
- Job shop
- Batch
- Repetitive manufacturing
The Acumatica Manufacturing Management ERP system application offerings include:
- Bill of Materials and Routing
- Production Management
- Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
- Advanced Planning and Scheduling
- Manufacturing Management
- Product Configurator
- Engineering Change Control (ECC)
- Manufacturing Data Collection (MDC)
- Acumatica for Arena Native Connector
- Manufacturing Estimates
- Inventory Management
- Sales Order Management
- Purchase Order Management
- Requisition Management
- ERP Business Intelligence and Analytics in Acumatica
- Financial Accounting (financial management)
- Project Accounting
- CRM (customer relationship management)
- Service Management
Bill of Materials (BOM) and Routing
This Acumatica for manufacturing ERP application lets your company accomplish product definition tasks. You can create, configure, and estimate hierarchical, multi-level BOMs and routings for new parts. The Acumatica BOM and Routing application lets your business incorporate engineering change controls.
Manufacturing can choose to create a custom Bill of Materials from estimates or use the rules-based product configurator.
Production Planning and Scheduling
Acumatica Manufacturing Edition provides tools manufacturers need for capacity planning and production scheduling, with forecasting, MRP (material requirements planning), MPS (master production scheduling), and long-term RCCP rough-cut capacity planning) to validate the MPS.
Manufacturing companies can determine when they will need manufacturing materials and the quantities needed for ordering vs. inventory levels in stock and production. They will also schedule the labor needed for production manufacturing processes.
Distribution Management
With Acumatica Manufacturing Edition distribution management functionality, your company can access a management system for using sales orders, purchase orders, and inventory to determine and meet production demands. The warehouse management system (WMS) allows you to track material by location.
Data Collection and Automation
Acumatica data collection features let your business use barcodes for warehouse and manufacturing operations and enable mobile device use. Acumatica Manufacturing ERP gives you a lot and serial number traceability.
Finance and Reporting
Acumatica also uses data collected for finance and reporting, including dashboards and analysis. With Acumatica Manufacturing Edition, manufacturers that perform project management-related manufacturing will get project costing features. Companies using outside processing can record outside processing costs through Acumatica for manufacturing.
Production Management
With Acumatica Manufacturing Management, your company will get real-time insights, including work-in-process (WIP) status. You’ll also have shop floor monitoring and consider quality control (with an add-on) and outside processing of parts.
Analytics and Business Intelligence
Acumatica can include embedded Finance and Business Intelligence applications with real-time dashboards, drill-down features, and the integration of Microsoft Power BI for visualization.
Scale Your Manufacturing Business with Acumatica Add-Ons
Additionally, your manufacturing business can choose integrations of other software from Acumatica and third-party software providers, including AP automation and a quality management system(QMS) for quality control. Besides its Manufacturing Edition ERP, Acumatica offers CRM, retail, and eCommerce connector solutions that may be useful to manufacturing companies.
AP Automation Add-On
Acumatica addresses some but not all of the challenges facing manufacturing companies. Third-party AP automation software with Acumatica integration covers the capabilities gap by adding touchless invoice processing in large volumes. With an AP automation add-on, your company will efficiently verify, match, approve, and pay global suppliers with invoice credit terms.
Accounts payable has traditionally been the most time-consuming and data-heavy function in accounting. However, modern AP automation software integrated with Acumatica Manufacturing Edition can provide cost savings and other key benefits for accounts payable invoice processing.
Tipalti Finance Automation Platform Overview
Tipalti AP automation reduces errors and fraud risks and simplifies tax and global regulatory compliance. It streamlines payables processes for automated invoice processing and scales with AP volume growth as your multi-entity business grows. Tipalti provides a dashboard with real-time metrics and trends for visibility.
Using Tipalti’s unified finance automation software integrated with Acumatica ERP will help your manufacturing company reduce hiring needs substantially.
Tipalti provides a unified cloud platform of finance automation software with ERP integrations. Its product offerings include AP automation, Mass Payments for global payouts, Expenses for May employee expense management automation and expense reimbursement, and Procurement management software.
The Tipalti software platform integrates with Acumatica ERP to augment the functional range of manufacturing and wholesale company solutions. It makes accounts payable, payouts, employee expense management, and procurement more efficient and robust.
In the U.S., manufacturers can apply for the Tipalti Card for smaller amounts of routine but controlled employee purchasing without requiring reimbursements.
Tipalti Multi-entity and Multi-currency AP Functionality
Like Acumatica, Tipalti offers multi-entity and multi-currency functionality for AP. With role permissions, you’ll view unit and combined accounts payable views, invoice processing results, cash requirements, and spend by category and vendor. Tipalti lets you pay supplier invoices in their currency of choice, offering different payment methods and 120 currencies in 196 countries.
You can choose to add Tipalti’s optional advanced foreign exchange (FX) software that works with Tipalti AP automation integrated with Acumatica Manufacturing Edition.
With Tipalti Multi-FX (supporting 30 currencies) your company will get live, competitive currency exchange rates and you’ll make centralized global payments without needing a regional international bank network. Tipalti FX Hedging allows your business to hedge its international accounts payable transactions for changes in exchange rates between the invoice date and payment date.
Supplier Management
Tipalti provides a white-branded Supplier Portal for guided, self-service supplier onboarding. Suppliers complete W-9 or W-8 forms online and indicate their preferred payment method with payment information. This ensures data accuracy and shifts the workload from the accounts payable team to your suppliers. Tipalti offers a Supplier Enablement program to educate your suppliers about this onboarding process.
Tipalti automatically validates supplier tax IDs through the Tipalti-built KPMG Approved Tax Engine to prevent fraud. Tipalti also checks suppliers against OFAC sanctions lists and other blacklists for AML and other global regulatory compliance.
Suppliers can access their automated invoice and payment status from invoice receipt to payment from within the Supplier Portal, minimizing the need for accounts payable staff interruptions and time requirements to respond to your suppliers’ previously constant stream of payment timing inquiries.
Supplier Tax Compliance
The IRS requires companies paying suppliers and freelancers to prepare information returns (1099-MISC, 1099-NEC, and 1042-S) and submit them to the IRS, applicable states with income taxes, and payment recipients. These information returns are due shortly after the end of each calendar year by IRS deadlines. The IRS is lowering the threshold for using eFiling instead of paper 1099 form returns.
Tipalti AP automation software makes tax compliance easy by:
- Collecting W-9 or W-8 forms data before the first payment (see supplier onboarding)
- Automatically tracking payments by supplier
- Automatically creating tax preparation reports to make IRS form filing easy
- Giving you the option of automatically eFiling 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC information returns
With 12 calendar months of Tipalti supplier and nonemployee compensation payments data uploaded through partnered software, ZenWork Tax1099 via a native Tipalti connection, your manufacturing company can automatically eFile its 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC forms.
Eliminating Paper Documents and Manual Data Entry
Tipalti embraces digital transformation by capturing supplier invoice fields with OCR and AI/ML technologies using header and line items. Digitization of invoices means that invoice processing isn’t burdened by time-consuming and human error-prone manual data entry into your Acumatica ERP.
Automated Invoice Processing with Digitized Data and AI
Instead, Tipalti does the heavy lifting automatically for end-to-end invoice processing from invoice receipt to verification, 3-way or 2-way matching with purchase orders and receiving data, approvals routing, global payments, and real-time payment reconciliation.
Because document information is digital, your business won’t experience lost paper documents, manual document matching, or warehouse costs for storing paper invoices offsite when archived.
Tipalti AIâ„ uses artificial intelligence technology for AI invoice processing. Tipalti AIâ„ includes automatic GL coding, exception detection, flagging for duplicate invoices and mismatched POs, predicting approvers, validating tax forms, and withholding. Tipalti also uses AI for business intelligence analytics.
Tipalti AP automation embeds Chat GPT generative AI and uses other AI and RPA technologies for making queries about business spend, determining anomalies, and automating routine workflows.
Fast, AI-assisted digital invoice processing means faster approvals from anywhere, anytime, and fewer bottlenecks. Your manufacturing company will process invoices on time to take lucrative early payment discounts, which is essential to reduce production costs and increase gross margin and profitability.
Efficient Global Payments and Automated Payment Reconciliation
Tipalti AP automation software lets you schedule payments to suppliers with large batch processing for efficiency. The batch will include multiple payment methods, multiple currencies, and total cash requirements to make the payments.
Tipalti syncs data with Acumatica and provides an automatically prepared, real-time payment reconciliation that can help your company accelerate its accounting close by up to 25%.
The Growing Importance of Digital Transformation for Manufacturing
Manufacturers improve efficiency and scale operations with automated, paperless, streamlined processes driven by artificial intelligence. AP automation integrates with Acumatica ERP. It reduces the need for new hires in the accounts payable and accounting department, saving money.
Manufacturing businesses need to implement digital transformation of accounts payable processes as quickly as possible because they will gain real-time insight into spending to make improvements and process supplier and vendor invoices quickly enough to take substantial early payment discounts on time. Early payment discounts on AP purchases reduce inventory costs and increase gross margin and profitability.
With less time spent on routine transaction processing, companies can become more analytic and strategic, finding new ways to contribute to business results. Request a demo to explore how Tipalti’s unified financial automation platform can help your manufacturing business achieve efficiency, cost reductions, better global payments with a choice of payment methods, and stronger financial controls.
