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Architectural Manufacturing ERP

Sabre ETO creates a Dynamics 365 Business Central ETO solution allowing Architectural Manufacturers to manage entire projects from a single dashboard.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and PrintVIS

Architectural manufacturing is a sub-type of Engineer-To-Order businesses supplying the construction trades. If your business would be considered a custom Architectural fabrication trade or custom fabrication for use in construction – then you would fall into this category.

Dynamics 365 Business Central combined with the Sabre ETO addon makes an excellent architectural manufacturing ERP as it can help manage a number of key requirements of architectural manufacturers.

Uploading data from CAD systems to the ERP as the design process progresses
Tracking the status and delivery of sections and zones of the project
Tracking material purchased for the entire project
Releasing sections or zones to production and tracking status and:
Managing costs of the project

A custom architectural manufacturer is a type of Engineer-To-Order manufacturer. You can tell this type of manufacturing apart from more common repetitive or make to order environments. The usually have a significant number of engineering designers on staff. These designers use information provided at a high level by architects to design and build solutions. The engineering team is part of the manufacturing process, in the sense that manufacturing has to wait on drawings to start, and those can sometimes take a long time to be completed.

Using Business Central to coordinate delivery of product, and the job shop production of their project components is a goal.

Examples of these kinds of companies:

Custom Architectural Manufacturing Pain Points

There are a number of unique challenges in this space. An architectural manufacturing ERP needs to account for these. From the outside, an architectural manufacturer may look like a high volume production manufacturing company. The reality is that many of these businesses have high product variation – with many variants in small quantities.

Their customers are notorious for not holding to schedules (due to weather and many other causes). Here are some major pain points:

Complex delivery schedules constrained by space and sequencing at the job site.
Requirement to track section, pallet, truck level logistics and coordinate with the installers/GC
Very high product variation between modules produced for the job site
Large up front purchases of mass or bulk product specific to the job such as aluminum extrusion or concrete aggregates…
A combination of both standard manufacturing and project level tracking.
Requirement to track both Lower skilled shop floor staff and highly skilled engineering staff
Often lost in Excel sheets to track progress and costs