Plastics and Rubber
Plastics and rubber products have developed an amazing presence in our lives. From the most commonplace tasks to the most unusual needs, plastics and rubber increasingly have provided the performance in products that consumers want. Because of their range of properties and design technologies, plastics and rubber offer consumer benefits unsurpassed by other materials. Despite the fact that the use of plastics is increasing worldwide, the plastics industry is still a highly competitive industry that is experiencing serious challenges. For many companies, a major challenge has been to deal with the effects of globalisation, which has led to lower industry growth as manufacturing flowed to lower-cost locations. The response has been to diversify into other products and markets, or identify niche areas such as producing higher quality goods.
Common characteristics of the plastics and rubber industry
Plastics and Rubber manufacturers share many common characteristics:
- Highly competitive in the global marketplace.
- Highly specialised and fragmented.
- Rapid technological innovation.
- Complex product designs.
- Short product life cycles.
- Engineering change control.
- Primary markets are packaging, construction, and consumer products.
- Increasing demand due to replacement of other materials.
- Markets include OEMs, consumer products, construction, packaging and bottling, and electronics.
- Specialised products sold on ability to deliver to customer order.
- Commodity products sold based on lowest price.
- Contract pricing and trade management.
- Some product demand is seasonal.
- Advertising at trade shows and in trade magazines.
- Technical representative sales force.
- Process manufacture.
- Capacity constraints.
- Recycling.
- Make-to-order.
- Make-to-stock.
- Injection and compression moulding.
- Yield management.
- Long and complex production process.
- Manufacture of bulk intermediaries.
- Co-products and by-products.
- Lot traceability.
- Quality monitoring and plant-floor data collection.
- Dangerous goods.
- Raw materials constitute the major manufacturing expense.
- Prices for some raw materials bound to crude oil prices.
- Demand driven by health of the economy.
- Profitability dependent on product volume and raw material cost.
- High shipping costs.
- Hedging.
- High capital outlay for equipment and tooling.
Plastics and rubber industry challenges
The challenges the plastics and rubber industries potentially face are to:
- Build customer relationships.
- Increase manufacturing efficiency.
- Manage costs.
- Manage complex production recipes.
- Accommodate variable ingredients, recipes and routings.
- Accommodate different units of measure at different stages of production and at finished goods level.
- Manage volume-constrained resources.
- Optimise capacity usage.
- Manage dynamic scheduling.
- Adopt lean manufacturing practices.
- Track work in progress.
- Track lots and batches.
- Reduce costs of frequent small production runs.
- Minimise waste and maximise yield.
- Implement changing technologies.
- Reduce inventory.
- Reduce lead times.
- Compete with low-cost suppliers in the global market.
- Remain profitable in the face of fluctuating raw material costs and low margins.
- Mitigate high shipping costs.
- Control dangerous goods.
- Reduce time from concept to market.
- Maximise margins in recycling programs.
- Manage exports.
- Optimise use of IT systems with limited IT resources.
- Integrate CAD, scheduling and production systems with business systems.
- Improve visibility to information across the business.
- Improve electronic collaboration with business partners and suppliers.
- Manage large receivables.
- Manage cash flow.
SYSPRO product modules can address these challenges
SYSPRO addresses these challenges with the following modules from its extensive enterprise resource planning suite. Suggested modules include:
- Engineering Change Control Module.
- Product Configurator Module.
- Blanket Sales Orders and Releases Module.
- Lot Traceability Module.
- Bill of Materials Module.
- Requirements Planning Module.
- Work in Progress Module.
- Factory Scheduling.
- Factory Documentation.
- Quality Data Collection Module.
- Contact Management Module.
- Activity Based Costing Module.
