Manufacturing Recipes and Formulas play a key role in Process Manufacturing, which is a type of manufacturing with a higher level of complexity (Miller, 2019). Industries like Food & Beverages, Agro Chemical, Foundries and Pharmaceuticals have final product forms that are very different from the raw materials that are used in their manufacturing.

Recipe and Formulas

Just imagine one product from the above-mentioned industries, say fertilizer (Romanowski, n.d.). It is manufactured using air, natural Gas, phosphate rock, nitric acid, phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid, potassium chloride, and various catalysts. The final fertilizer is in the form of small granules that are sprinkled on to the ploughed fields.

Here, there are recipes for various kinds of fertilizers which means that you need to take some ingredients and treat them in a way and then add more ingredients and again treat in a certain way until the final product is obtained. These recipes include formulas which tell us that certain quantities of certain ingredients together produce certain products.

MRP, the Wizard of ERP

The ERPs include Material Requirements Planning system or MRP (Rabiyya, n.d.), which takes care of the recipes and formulas. You can configure each and every material in it, may it be in solid, liquid or gaseous form and also associate measures of quantity and price in numerous forms and currencies.

The complete manufacturing processes can be configured in the MRP which will be comprised of recipes and formulas. Once all the information is defined, real-time calculations will be provided by the MRP to help in manufacturing any of the products.

Example

Let us again take a hypothetical example of fertilizer manufacturing and say that the factory obtained a demand of 5 tons of certain type of fertilizer that they manufacture. 

Hypothetically speaking, the order is obtained through the CRM and put up for approval. The approver sees the information about the order and also sees that the factory is almost out of stock for sulfuric acid and a certain catalyst. The approver is further informed based on the suppliers’ information that the short fall can easily be met and an estimated date of delivery is also visible.

The approver further sees in the system that the order can be supplied in time if the logistics arrangement in in place. The approver approves the manufacturing and raises the alert for the logistics team.

The customer is immediately communicated over CRM about their updated order status and reminds them about their payment due date.

You can see from the above examples, how complex the process manufacturing is and how helpful the MRP is, in making sure that all actions of the manufacturing process are well orchestrated and conveyed to the right people at the right time.

Conclusion

The Wizard of ERP is at your service to keep all your stakeholders well informed at all times and to facilitate all the stakeholders by reaching out to them whenever any input is required from anybody. Your manufacturing continues well managed without unexpected delays whether you have 3 product recipes or 300 product recipes.