Maintaining and increasing profitability is key to business survival. Best-in-class manufacturers seem to be one step ahead of their competition, year after year. This infographic identifies 10 ideas these manufacturers are using to increase their profitability. It includes strategies you might not consider such as: - Use profitability to prioritize projects - Make contract management a competitive advantage - Minimize the impact of engineering change notice (ECN) For more information, visit dynamics.cincom.com.

1. Manufacturing Products Insights By:
Louis Columbus
Best Practices from Best-in-Class Project-Based Manufacturers
Use Profit to Best Practices in Analytics
and Reporting Strategies
Prioritize Projects Earned Value Management
Build out your own benchmarks of how you evaluate projects Take a critical look deal-by-deal over the year. It could be that
by taking into account the time on the production floor as smaller deals executed with greater precision were actually
well as any constraints around overall resources. more profitable than bigger deals.
More Fewer
smaller projects, larger projects,
more profitable less profitable
time on production overall resources
Determine actual profitability
by breaking down profitability
in terms of:
Unleash Your Company's Expertise • Time-based cost
on Each Project–Now • Cost of materials
• Opportunity cost of
Build out the enabling systems around your expertise. Be other areas
able to capture expertise and exclusive knowledge and
drive it into the overall process. Companies that really excel
on project management have this nailed. Quality is an obses-
sion for them, with knowledge capture as a core strength.
18% Gross Profit per Project 30%
Manage Projects
Globally for Results Information becomes the accel-
erator that delivers precise data
Two-tier ERP strategies enable companies to drill deep into on a market-by-market basis and
the different regions that they serve. This gives them very really frees companies to excel.
precise metrics for those specific markets and the ability to
incorporate those different aspects of that supply chain in
that manufacturing process specific to that region.
Collaborate
Share Project Data with Customers
Executing projects profitably requires a great deal of orches- There is a fundamental shift in the behavior - now the expec-
tration, but it also requires the ability to share project data. tations are real time data. It's an interactive exchange, with
Shared project management up and down the supply chain the expectation that it's going to be personal, fast, accurate.
is a trend we see more and more.
150 Million
conversations
occur online each
day with customers
parts in
Minimize Engineering Change Notice
Cost and Time Delays
a project are ECNs can be a signal that something is wrong in a process
outsourced or they could be a signal that you are doing an incredible
amount of customization work for a given customer.
Make Contract Management
a Competitive Advantage
Don't just use contract management as a repository for differ-
ent files. Think about how you can use contract management
to drive financial analysis off of them and take advantage of
Drill into contracts. Get to the clause level.
those discounts.
Get the financials Drive financial Take advantage
anywhere, anytime. analysis from them. of discounts.
Make Quality Pay and Capture Project Requirements
Differentiate Your Company Right the 1 Time st
Allocate the time to build in quality and develop an approach Capture all of your project requirements through a centralized
around quality management. That gives quality an integral office. This will enable you to drive that information through
role of the overall project from the very beginning. all divisions with consistency across the enterprise.
estimating product project configuration
Make time to
make quality pay
pricing bidding quoting
Free Webinar
Hear firsthand how companies have put these ten ideas into practice in
this on-demand webinar. Louis Columbus, Senior Manager, Enterprise
Systems at Cincom Systems, shares his experience and insight to provide Form: CMUS1301013
clarity to real-world business problems. Check out the Webinar here: ©2012 Cincom Systems, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Cincom and the Quadrant Logo are
Watch Webinar registered trademarks of Cincom
Systems, Inc. All other trademarks
belong to their respective companies.