Small Business Manufacturing Provides an Affordable Solution With a Familiar Look and Feel

By Lynn Yoffee

If your manufacturing clients have been seeking a solution tailored to their needs, check out Small Business Manufacturing (SBM), an Office Accounting add-on that helps manufacturers estimate, plan, execute and analyze their manufacturing, yet keeps it simple and flexible.

 

"We focus on functionality for manufacturers that wish to track work orders, estimates for customers, costs and materials," said Ranjit Charles, of Osborne Charles Group, the company that developed SBM. "It makes everything seamless and timely. SBM works across a broad spectrum of manufacturers."

 

With its familiar Microsoft Office and Office Accounting interface, it's easy to learn and flexible to use. It feels, navigates and functions as a natural extension of Office Accounting. Activity from the manufacturing side is immediately reflected in inventory and the financials of Office Accounting.

 

For starters, the cost estimating functionality provides flexibility to price out up to three quantities for each item. Each item allows clients to include material, labor and overhead that may be required in manufacturing. As cost estimates are built, there's flexibility to copy from another estimate or a template. Materials and labor can be brought in from other information sources. A summary screen provides a quick snapshot of the whole picture. Additional mark-ups can then be added to material, labor, overhead, or to the entire estimate. These mark-ups can be defined as percent of costs or as flat amounts. Then, export this estimation to Excel for further analysis if needed.

 

Once the cost estimate meets your client's approval, a formal document can be either printed or e-mailed to the customer. And when the client's customer gives approval, the cost estimate can then be converted into a sales order, quote, or a manufacturing work order with a click of a button.

 

 

Small Business Manufacturing looks like and navigates like Office Accounting. Here's a snapshot of the home page.

 

 

In addition, SBM can:

 

● Convert estimates to sales orders, quotes, and work orders effortlessly

● Create a multi-level bill of materials

● Create routings or operations sequences

● Create work orders manually or convert them automatically from sales orders

● Plan material purchases and production

● Issue materials manually or backflush them through material count points

● Track work in progress and actual labor activity

● Track and report material scrap and rejects

●Compare and analyze planned activities and costs to actual activities and costs

 

An Affordable Value for Small Businesses

 

Traditionally, small manufacturers use only financial systems to invoice customers and write checks to vendors. "A lot of them do this because there isn't a system in this marketplace," said Charles. "The ones that are available to be retrofitted to small businesses can be $40,000 or more and require lots of training."

 

At $349 per user, SBM is an exceptional value for most small business budgets.

 

Today, manufacturers want to do a lot more, like getting a good picture of costs, particularly when they quote similar jobs. "They have spreadsheets that are all over the place and they don't have a good sense of things like supply shortages. The mid market solutions were either too complex, expensive or too big of an investment in training," Charles said, which is why his company has built SBM ‑ catering directly to this market.

 

SBM set up varies depending on the complexity of the business. It's possible to add as many levels of detail as a client needs. "For example, a lot of businesses have heavy investments in capital equipment and they need to establish different rates to recover their investments in those pieces of equipment. Part of it is just trying to figure out what the critical pieces of information are that you want to get out of it," Charles said.

 

SBM is well integrated with Office Accounting and appears, simply, as a menu option. All the integration happens behind the scenes in real time. Installation is painless because it aligns to Office Accounting automatically. After about three hours of training, users are ready to get to work.

 

For more information, contact Ranjit Charles at rcharles@osbornecharles.com or visit Osborne Charles Group.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Microsoft.