Catalyst Manufacturing® is a full-featured Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system designed to meet the planning, scheduling, and inventory needs of the small and midsized manufacturer in make-to-order, assemble-to-order, make-to-stock, and engineer-to-order/configure-to-order production environments.
Catalyst offers manufacturers an affordable enterprise solution with prices starting at $1,250 for a system including all modules and the QuickBooks interface.
Catalyst Manufacturing provides features and functionality that can truly “accelerate the way you do business” including:
• Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) engine to quickly identify make and buy requirements based on bill-of-material (BOM) explosion
• Ability to maintain lot and serial number control with multi-level how-made/where-used lot traceability
• Multi-level indented BOM/route reports and graphical indented BOM/route views
• Mass shop order release process that faciliates the review of material shortages and capacity prior to the release and distribution of shop orders to production
• Streamlined purchase order consolidation and auto-PO create process
• Ability to manage materials and production at outside process vendor locations
• Ability to allocate inventory to identify inventory available for new orders
• Features & Options setup and quote configuration for engineer-to-order/configure-to-order environments
• Finite capacity scheduling with Gantt chart production schedule board
• Material and labor backflush with backflush confirmation at receipt
• Ability to add quote lines, build quote configurations, convert to shop orders and ship against the quote without adding as a standard inventory item
• Ability to automatically calculate panel, stile, and rail dimensions for custom cabinets based on base model configurations
• Ability to store and maintain inventory for lumber, tubes, pipes, etc. using dimensional inventory
• Ability to consign finished goods inventory at customer locations
• Cycle Count module to identify inventory errors and apply corrective actions
• Net change physical inventory capability
• Over 150 standard reports
Catalyst organizes foundation data (customers, vendors, items, product configurations, etc.) and processes transaction data to support typical business processes used by the small manufacturer.
The interface between Catalyst and QuickBooks allows for enhanced synchronization of your manufacturing and financial data by sending customer, vendor, bill, and invoice records to QuickBooks as records are updated in Catalyst. The transfer occurs in real-time if a QuickBooks company is open locally or in batch mode for updates that occurred while the QuickBooks application was closed.
All inventory items in Catalyst (raw material, intermediate-level/WIP, sub-assemblies, and finished product) can be exported to QuickBooks with their current inventory balance and value. The inventory items that appear in the detail section of the customer invoice or vendor bill are created in QuickBooks if the item does not already exist at the time the transaction is created. While Catalyst remains the inventory system of record, the inventory balances and values can be updated in QuickBooks with the click of a button. This allows QuickBooks to reflect the current quantity and value of the different inventory asset accounts at any given time making it easier to report and review financials at period end or any time in between.
The process begins by entering a customer order in Catalyst. After any necessary estimating, planning, and scheduling, a shop order is released to production to make the product. The shop order consumes labor and material as it is converted into a final product which is then shipped to the customer. At this point the process is handed off to QuickBooks by creating a customer invoice based on the shipment transaction. QuickBooks is then used to receive payments against the invoice and generate financial and accounting journal entries and reports of the business activity. Similarly, vendor bills are entered into QuickBooks when the vendor invoice is entered into Catalyst. The vendor bill is then used as the basis for processing vendor payments and updating the relevant expense and liability accounts.