Co- and by-product tracking added to planning

Business enterprise software that helps increase visibility, planning and costing accuracy for manufacturers now features co-product and by-product tracking.

Business enterprise software that helps increase visibility, planning and costing accuracy for manufacturers now features co-product and by-product tracking.

K3 Business Technology Group has introduced co-product and by-product tracking to its SYSPRO enterprise software.

SYSPRO helps increase visibility, planning and costing accuracy for manufacturers.

Co-products are products manufactured together or sequentially, because of similarities in the products or processes.

By-products are secondary materials of value, produced from the primary production process.

SYSPRO now gives manufacturers even greater insight into their operations through the ability to track and cost both co-products and by-products.

SYSPRO allows co-products to be configured and manufactured as multiple items against a single Bill of Materials.

K3 explained in a recent report to manufacturingtalk that to make cost-tracking more accurate, components and operations can simply be defined against co-products as a percentage of the entire material, operation and subcontract costs.

Alternatively, a more complex distribution of costs can be applied by defining components and operations as a percentage of each co-product.

This flexibility ensures accurate costing for each co-product, traditionally a problem area for manufacturers, said K3.

SYSPRO provides additional flexibility because it allows co-products to be billed as follows.

* Sequential (i e, co-products can be completed before the job as a whole is complete).

* Concurrent (i e, all co-products are manufactured at the same time and 'receipted in' at the end of the job).

* Multi-grade (for costing purposes).

* Proportional (i e, there is a marked size difference between the various co-products - indicated by a percentage value).

SYSPRO facilitates the tracking of by-products by accurately representing the quantity as a 'supply' throughout the system.

This gives manufacturers the option of either receipting the by-product when kit-issuing components to the job (i e, before the by-product is produced) or at the time of posting labour to the operation (i e, when the by-product is produced).

Managing director of K3, Howard Joseph, said SYSPRO caters for a number of different manufacturing environments requiring multiple items to be designed, manufactured and planned as a single manufacturing run - such as food, medical devices, electronic components and machinery and equipment manufacture.

He said: "The ability to accommodate co- and by-products within SYSPRO provides these manufacturers even greater efficiencies.".

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