palletcentral

26 PalletCentral • January-February 2023 palletcentral.com Management R unning the day-to-day business of a pallet company is complex in today's unpredictable marketplace. Distractions can keep you from meeting goals and tracking progress on a regular basis. From workforce and lumber shortages, client's demands, fulfilling contracts, and managing cashflow and expenses, owners and managers wear many hats in one day. More and more, pallet company operators are turning to the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, human resources, manufacturing, order processing, project management, sales, risk management and compliance, supply chain operations, and more. ERP systems typically include the following characteristics: • An integrated system • Operates in (or near) real time • A common database that supports all the applications • A consistent look and feel across modules • Installation of the system with elaborate application/data integration by the Information Technology (IT) department, provided the implementation is not done in small steps • Deployment options include on-premises, cloud hosted, or SaaS Here are the benefits of using ERP in your company. E fficiently Running Your Production All Systems Go e beauty of an ERP is the automation and reporting you can get at your fingertips, especially if your business is planning to or is already expanding across multiple locations. "Our ERP is the central data collection and information sharing system for our company. As we've grown from one location and 15 employees to three locations with 175 employees, running multiple shifts in multiple states, we needed a way to get our company speaking the same language from a data perspective," says Nick Wenner, President, Pallet Service Corp/Grove Lumber. "With multiple fragmented spreadsheets housing data independently, we were tracking data, but getting fast, accurate and actionable information was getting exponentially harder as we were growing in terms of volume, geography, and headcount. Fragmented data collection leads to fragmented reporting. e only thing worse than no data is bad data, that is inaccurate, inconvenient, or inaccessible." Adding to that, "At 48forty, we use our ERP to help manage almost every part of our business," says Mike Hachtman, CEO, Relogistics Services. "From customer orders, tracking production, inventory management, piece rate calculations – even tracking our trailers are all managed with our ERP system." ERP isn't just for big companies; small and medium-sized organizations can also benefit. "e advantages of an ERP system are significant, regardless of the size of the business," Hachtman continues. "An ERP provides accurate tracking of Ensuring your data and production from start to finish is operating at its peak performance can be done easily with enterprise resource planning. By Caryn Smith

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