Throughout the year, it is necessary to purchase and have gifts sent to varying parts of the country.  I suspect that many of us face this every Christmas, Birthday, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and the list goes on.  We call these “giftable holidays” in my house.  Every giftable holiday, the hunt for the desired gift and hopefully free shipping begins and usually ends a little too close to desired arrival date.  So, the giftable holiday recipient usually finds a package waiting for them 2-3 days after the giftable holiday.  Fortunately, the people that we send these gifts to know us, love us, and forgive our tardiness. There is no expectation of on-time delivery placed upon my household, and it’s a darn good thing!

That is not the case in the manufacturing world.  On-time delivery can be the difference between maintaining a customer or not.  Sometimes discounted pricing cannot even save you when the customer has had one too many experiences with late deliveries.  It’s the domino effect.  You need material to meet a customer order, your customer needs the product you provide in order to complete and process an order for their customer, and the dominoes continue to fall.

If you survey any group of small to medium manufacturers, you’ll likely find that two of the top reasons they fail to deliver on time are:

1. Receipt of raw materials are past due

2. Dependency on subcontractors (let down by suppliers)

These issues can easily be remedied with the adoption of Customer and Vendor Portals. These vendor and customer portals are a great way to connect on a mobile device or computer and share information that will increase visibility and create an efficient process from supplier to customer. These portals are customizable and and allow customers to review their orders, invoices, verify billing/shipping information, and even take credit card payments. These are critical pieces in the customer service game of dominoes that will allow information to be obtained without creating unnecessary strain on the customer service department.

On the front end of the supply chain, vendors can access current inventory levels of raw materials and see materials needed for future orders, thus eliminating the guesswork of supply and demand within the process.

Infor SyteLine ERP has also given you the ability to customize the portals or use pre-defined fields that work to your benefit and convey the information that is most important to the customer and the vendor.  Import your logo, color scheme, pictures, and text to create the message that you want to send and let Infor SyteLine ERP customer and vendor portals do the rest of the work.