6 Reasons Trailer Manufacturers Use (And Love) Genius ERP

For over three decades, Genius ERP has worked closely with custom manufacturers across North America, helping them to streamline their operations and improve productivity.

Genius has a team of manufacturing experts that know what drives transportation equipment manufacturing to the next level. With many of our customers coming from the trailer and transportation industry, we have worked hand-in-hand with this group of manufacturers to hone our ERP system to include the features that trailer manufacturers want and need. Giving results from day one, our ERP solution provides trailer manufacturers with the tools they need to lower costs and grow their businesses.

RELATED CASE STUDY: Motrec | Transportation Industry

Genius ERP will help you work faster — and smarter — to 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.”

6 Reasons Trailer Manufacturers Use Genius ERP

1. Scheduling

Any custom manufacturer knows that scheduling can be a nightmare for a busy shop floor working on complicated custom jobs. But through decades of experience working with custom trailer manufacturers, Genius ERP can create a schedule for your shop that is both useful and accurate. From constructing the frame, through fabrication, painting, and the final assembly, Genius can create an easy-to-follow schedule. Not only does this help your shop stay organized and on track, it can also give you lead times to provide customers with more accurate delivery dates.

Genius includes advanced tools for shop floor scheduling and planning and can schedule work centers, personnel, required parts, and tools based on your BOM, plus your actual workload and capacity. With Genius ERP, you will align your entire shop and ensure everyone is working on the right priorities at the right time.

2. Job Costing

Knowing which jobs in your shop are profitable and which aren’t is a major struggle for trailer manufacturers. With so many variables at play — everything from the fluctuating price of raw materials like steel to how much labor is needed on a complicated custom job — it’s hard for trailer manufacturers to know which builds they are making the most money on.

Genius ERP provides custom manufacturers with total visibility and connectivity, as well as gives you real-time data that you can use to calculate job costs. A fully-integrated ERP system lets you trace job costs throughout your production process and accurately assign costs to each job in your shop. With Genius ERP, you can track standard, average, and actual product costs, as well as analyze profitability by job, project, or contract. These insights give you a better idea of where you are making money — and where you are not — and will help you decide what jobs to go after to increase your profits.

3. Product Configurator

Genius ERP’s product configurator tool is one of the most sought-after features within our ERP system — and one that can give you a leg up on your competition. Our intuitive and easy-to-use product configurator can help you to configure a custom trailer build from start to finish.

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, trailer manufacturers rely on spreadsheets to configure a product and create a BOM. Not only does Genius automate this time-consuming process, but its built-in tools will also automatically tell you what raw goods and materials you have in inventory, plus what needs to be purchased to complete the trailer. Genius can either purchase these goods for you, or send you alerts and reminders to tell you what needs to be bought to finish the job.

4. Complete Visibility and Oversight

Genius ERP provides you with a real-time picture of your production floor to continually track, control, and fine-tune your shop for maximum efficiency. With Genius, you can manage all aspects of each job and juggle shifting priorities with a fully integrated and connected system.

You can get a total overview of your operations using real-time data and our helpful dashboards and reports, ensuring that your employees are working on the right priorities to drive 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 slip.

5. Inventory Management

Our ERP inventory management system will monitor your 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. Our reordering tool will identify potential shortages based on real-time 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.

6. Warranty Tracking

Trailer manufacturers can also manage warranties through Genius ERP. Easily coordinate and manage service calls and warranty requests within our system to streamline communications, making it easy for you and your dealers to service your products — and keep your customers happy.

You can also track warranty information and issues through Genius, so if you see the same issue coming up over and over again, you can go back to your engineering and production departments to fix the problem — and reduce your overall warranty issues.

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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 trailer manufacturing operations to lower costs and drive your business forward.