South African manufacturers know the challenges of streamlining business processes, generating accurate pricing, and calculating their total manufacturing costs. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions have long been touted as a successful tool to overcome these and other obstacles. But for them to be effective, they must integrate with a myriad of systems and evolve as business needs change.

“Manufacturers have come to rely on multiple software applications to manage their business environments. Whether it is customer relationship management, job costings, accounting, and even stock movements, the software provides the golden thread that ties all operational processes together. The reality is that the modern manufacturer requires an integrated resource management environment to ensure the entire manufacturing footprint is running as optimally as possible,” says InterSystems South African Country Manager Henry Adams.

Understanding Manufacturing Requirements

Working with a specialist ERP, accounting, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) developer like InterSystems’ partner, Huge Software, can pay significant dividends. Targeting businesses in engineering, manufacturing, wholesale distribution and other industries, the Huge ERP application has continually adapted to meet the demands of local manufacturers.

“At its core, Huge ERP delivers accurate and efficient operations hosted in the cloud or on-premises. Using automation and collaboration features, Huge ERP can reduce business costs. When coupled with InterSystems, we take this further, and real-time data insights allow for better business decision-making and immediately detect errors while preventing operational inconsistencies,” says Huge Software director Malcolm Granville.

As a manufacturer grows, new challenges arise, processes become more complex, and new ones need to be introduced to capitalise on opportunities. One of the problems with traditional ERP systems is that they are notoriously challenging to use and implement and are inflexible to meet new demands. The focus of Huge ERP is to create an intuitive experience with a system that is structured to create a natural flow within the manufacturing environment, and it is built on a high-end database that can reliably streamline daily tasks.

A Modular Environment

Huge ERP combines the best of technology innovation to provide a structured solution that creates a natural flow within an accounting package. For example, the Huge accounting application helps streamline accounting processes and reduces financial reporting costs. It also integrates with the overarching ERP system and offers robust functionality for keeping track of a manufacturer’s financial performance.

The software consists of eight major modules:

• System configuration
• General ledger (cashbooks and journals)
• Customers / receivables
• Suppliers / payables
• Inventory (service industry, stock, outsourcing and fixed assets)
• Job costing and scheduling
• CRM
• TrackIT - Asset management

Sub-modules include:

• Bill of materials, kits and tasks
• Multi-warehousing
• Multi-currency
• Serial number tracking
• Case lots, units of measure and dimensions
• Recurring transactions
• Time logging
• Support log ticketing
• Sales representative and technician tracking and documents
• Webatar Smart Mobile Business app for 
•  IOS and Android

“The Huge team is committed to delivering a tailored ERP solution that addresses all the unique needs of local manufacturers. Using the InterSystems data platform technology and its own best practice, Huge has dev-eloped an integrated ERP application that is scalable, reliable, and performs according to requirements,” says Adams.

An Interoperable Environment

Huge ERP delivers the interoperability with existing solutions and advanced reporting capabilities that, when combined with InterSystems technologies, are essential to understanding the insights derived from organisational data.

“We chose InterSystems as our technology partner of choice when we first started the Huge ERP journey in 2005. InterSystems provides us with leading-edge software technology that deliveries a rock-solid application platform backed up by some of the best technical support in the industry,” says Granville.

Harnessing disparate data to provide leadership with a platform to make decisions that can unleash the full potential of their operations is one of the strengths of the Huge ERP environment.

“When injected into the Huge ERP application, InterSystems technology can help organisations overcome the struggle of data silos and their limitations on manufacturing innovation. With Huge Software and InterSystems in place, local manufacturers can achieve better business outcomes,” concludes Adams.