Many contract manufacturers now provide the critical link in their customers’ supply chain – the link that determines speed-to-market and frequently underlies pricing. Both commercial and defense-oriented contract manufacturers are under pressure to continually deliver faster, cheaper, and at the highest quality.

Yet the planning, scheduling and reporting complexities keep increasing for CEMs. It’s common in this industry to produce many dissimilar projects, jobs, or customer orders. Which can also include customer supplied parts, stock items, and/or purchased inventory and have lengthy, multi-stage production runs or require extremely quick turn. All of these factors can make aggressive project management a daunting task.

Relevant enterprise software was designed to facilitate estimating, measuring, controlling, and reporting by department, project or task/work breakdown level. Its use of time-stamped data for all time sensitive activities including inventory, costs, shop orders, etc, helps managers examine costs against time-lined budgets, right down to the task level.

Key Relevant Contract Manufacturing capabilities enable:

• Design engineering: a “sandbox” for pre-production design efforts that remains invisible to the system (and free from the constraints of manufacturing document control) until the product and item masters are copied over
• Engineering change control which enforces discipline over modifications to the bill of materials and shop floor routings
• Rich estimating capabilities that establish project budget baselines
• Project workbench that tracks costed transactions by project and details project status on-line at any point in the life cycle of the project, including identifying project variance versus estimate
• Clear pegging of supply and demand by project
• Full lot/serial control
• MRP by project
• Milestones for EV and/or billing impact and the ability to drive resource requirements via task management milestones
• Fully C/SSC and CSR business process compliant

These capabilities are delivered via Relevant modules with project-orientation designed in. Key modules include:

Costing: Work Breakdown Structure, Earned Value Management

Engineering: Design Engineering, Production Engineering, Engineering Change Control, Estimating, Quoting

Manufacturing: Project Control, Shop Floor Control

Materials: Material Requirements Planning, Lot/Serial Control, Inventory Control

System: Multi-Divison/Multi-Plant/Multi-Company

Other Relevant modules smoothly integrate with Relevant’s project-oriented modules and together provide full enterprise support geared to deliver superior performance to contract manufacturers.

Relevant software is scalable and extremely reliable and backs its promises with 23 years of experience and satisfied industry customers, including some of the biggest names in the business.