As a chemical manufacturer, you face a myriad of challenges through your operations in a highly regulated industry. Some of those challenges include the ever-increasing cost of raw materials, managing formulations and new product development, adhering to regulatory changes and the associated costs, and organizing operational and manufacturing data. With all of those potential obstacles, it is critical for your chemical manufacturing company to have a strong ERP system that can centralize scheduling, costing, lot traceability, and formula management. A Microsoft Dynamics™ solution may be in place, but if so, it most likely isn’t supporting your chemical manufacturing company’s needs because it isn’t built for formula or process manufacturers. Most ERP systems are designed to manage discrete manufacturing but do not account for the numerous variables encountered by a chemical manufacturer. Enter Vicinity’s chemical manufacturing software…
Vicinity has been developed with the focused goal of building a manufacturing system written specifically for, and serving only, formula-based manufacturers—not as an alteration to a discrete or assembly system. Vicinity’s chemical manufacturing software integrates with Microsoft Dynamics (BC, GP, NAV, SL), addressing areas across R&D, purchasing, production planning, quality control, compliance, production control, finance and customer service. Below are some of the ways those modules can help you to overcome the challenges that chemical manufacturers face.
Ever-Increasing Cost of Raw Materials
While you can’t usually control the cost of raw materials, having Vicinity’s chemical manufacturing software in place can help you manage and prepare for any raw material cost fluctuations. Our proposed cost function allows you to adjust the cost of a raw material in the system and account for that over time to see how it will affect your overall profitability. When you are able to budget accordingly for increasingly expensive raw materials, you can control the way those costs affect your bottom line. You can also use historical data from the system to forecast longer-term demand, and schedule by formula to batch yields, which allows you to use those costly raw materials more effectively.
Managing Formulations and New Product Development
As a chemical manufacturer, your R&D department will often have an array of formulation variations. Vicinity’s chemical manufacturing software supports both production and R&D formulations in one unified system. This provides R&D with the ability to search through, and select from, the entire list of formulas to meet specific needs, and also to create new and different versions from existing formulations. New product development becomes easier for you because your data is centralized and your production efforts are streamlined.
Adhering to Regulatory Changes and the Associated Costs
With strict guidelines set in place for Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) documentation and OSHA’s new standards of revised requirements for GHS (Globally Harmonized System) compliance, which include new classifications and labels as well as reformatted safety data sheets (SDS), you need high levels of clarity in your chemical manufacturing records. With all of that mandated data management, Vicinity’s chemical manufacturing software can centralize compliance documents and assist you in the generation of compliance documents. Generation of SDS can be done on demand or in bulk to PDF files, directly from the master production formula. Vicinity also integrates directly to the leading GHS/SDS authoring tools on the market today. Your costs reduce because your efficiency is increased.
Organizing Operational and Manufacturing Data
Data management and the need to consolidate data into one location is a key challenge for chemical manufacturers. Housing QA data in one system, formula and packaging processes in another, regulatory data like GHS/SDS in another system, and costing stored in yet another, causes challenges to keep everything in sync. Companies come to Vicinity with the goal of centralizing that scattered data into one consolidated system, allowing them to navigate it more efficiently, manipulate it in a single access point, and reduce the amount of paperwork needed on the production floor.
If you are a formula or process manufacturer in the paint, coatings, cosmetics, personal care, fragrance, pharmaceutical, nutraceutical or specialty chemicals industry, Vicinity has the tools you need to handle formula development and management, compliance documentation, lot control and tracking, QC results and analysis, batch yield analysis and scheduling by formula. Contact Vicinity today for more information on chemical manufacturing software and a product demo.