ERP Solutions for Transportation Manufacturers

Transportation manufacturers have been trusting Genius ERP for over 30 years to make them more efficient, profitable, and productive. Whether building trailers, work trucks, boats, industrial vehicles, or aircraft — if it rolls, floats, flies, hauls, or anything in between — our solution helps these complex and custom manufacturers deliver.

Genius ERP is built to help manufacturers work faster and smarter. We help you increase your throughput and become more efficient by giving you complete visibility and oversight of your operation. You will be more organized, more systematic, and deliver more stock on time and on budget with Genius. “It’s more than just a computer system,” said Erin McClain, Administrator at Raglan Industries, a custom trailer manufacturer based out of Ontario, Canada, and a long-time customer of Genius ERP. “It’s an improvement on our operational processes.”

RELATED CASE STUDY: Motrec | Transportation Industry

Here are the top features that transportation manufacturers love in Genius ERP.

1. Job Costing

Transportation manufacturers can struggle to identify which jobs are profitable and exactly how much profit each job brings in. Variables like the cost of raw materials and the general amount of labor required for a project are easy enough to estimate, but to get a truly accurate number — and to be clear, it’s only valuable if it is accurate — you need a solution that can measure each aspect of the manufacturing process completely.

Genius ERP brings together real-time information from inventory and purchasing, the engineering department, shop floor labor, machine time, and shipping costs — and calculates a true cost you can rely on. This allows you to monitor standard, average, and actual product costs, as well as analyze profitability by job, project, or contract. These insights will help you identify which jobs are making money and which are not, allowing you to focus on the most profitable ones and increase your profits.

2. Product Configurator

Genius ERP has developed a robust and simple-to-use product configurator tool that gives transportation manufacturers a distinct advantage over their competition. Built directly into the software, our product configurator can help you configure a custom build from start to finish, simply by selecting and combining pre-existing elements.

The Product Configurator is a powerful tool that enables you to reduce the time and expertise needed to create accurate quotes and sales orders. With this tool, your sales team can access a list of configurable products, options, and visuals to create a complete and accurate quote for a client — and determine the right sales price to ensure a profit. If your product is 100% configurable, no other engineering action is required to launch production, and Genius will automatically create a fully-itemized BOM (Bill of Materials) for you.

Without the product configurator, transportation manufacturers would have to rely on spreadsheets to cobble together a draft product and create a semi-accurate BOM. With Genius ERP, you can automate this time-consuming process using our built-in tools that will automatically confirm what raw goods and materials are already in inventory, plus what needs to be purchased to complete the job. Then you can either have Genius purchase these goods for you or send you alerts and reminders to tell your team what needs to be bought to finish the job.

3. Complete Visibility and Oversight

There’s nothing more important to a transport manufacturer than real-time information. Genius ERP provides a consistent, immediate picture of the shop floor to continually track, control, and fine-tune your shop for maximum efficiency. With Genius, transportation manufacturers can manage all aspects of each job and juggle shifting priorities with a fully integrated and connected system.

A complete overview of operations using real-time data, and our helpful dashboards and reports, ensure that your team is working on the right priorities to move your business forward. Real-time data enables you to assess work center performance and availability, as well as system performance as a whole, track task progress, monitor timesheets, and manage costs for each job in your shop or on the job site. You will also be able to detect production bottlenecks and catch issues early — before they get worse and cause delivery deadlines to be missed.

4. Inventory Management

Transportation manufacturers can significantly reduce their costs and save time by using Genius ERP’s inventory management system. We monitor inventory down to the serial number to give you an accurate inventory count every second of the day.

With Genius ERP, you can track your inventory needs, control your costs, and replenish stock based on actual on-the-job demand with our streamlined and fully integrated system. To prevent production interruptions and do away with unexpected material shortages, you will always know how many of each item in your inventory is available, reserved for jobs, in production, and on order.

Genius ERP also comes equipped with a recommended reorder tool that tells you when to repurchase materials and parts — so that you never have a material shortage again. The built-in reordering tool will identify potential shortages based on actual current inventory, expected delivery times, and the date the item is required according to your in-process production orders. It will tell you when it’s time to order more items and allows you to combine purchase lists from multiple orders to streamline the purchasing process.

——

Request a demo of Genius ERP today to see all of these features and more — including how we can manage distributors for you. We will help you streamline your transportation manufacturing operations to lower costs and drive your business forward.