Häufig gestellte Fragen
What does an ERP system for mechanical engineering cost?
Reliable total costs for a machinery ERP in the mid-market range, based on experience, between around 300,000 and 1,500,000 euros over the first three to five years, depending on user numbers, sites and depth of customising. As a rough rule of thumb, mid-market companies often budget one to three percent of annual revenue for an ERP project including the first year of operation. The biggest cost drivers are the variant configurator and the PDM/PLM integration, which is why special machinery builders with a high engineer-to-order share tend to reach the upper end. Added to this are ongoing maintenance and update fees of typically around 18 to 22 percent of the licence sum per year for on-premise models, or a cloud subscription that is usually based on the number of users; details in the guide ERP costs.
Cloud or on-premise - which operating model fits in mechanical engineering?
Both models are widespread in mechanical engineering, and the choice depends heavily on the degree of customisation. Cloud or SaaS solutions are gaining ground especially in smaller and mid-sized deployments because they offer lower initial investment, faster implementation and predictable running costs. On-premise remains the first choice where very deep adaptations, close machine and shop-floor integration or high data sovereignty requirements exist. In practice, many machinery manufacturers now rely on hybrid approaches and private cloud models to combine flexibility and control; an assessment can be found at Cloud vs. On-Premise.
How long does it take to implement a machinery ERP?
In mechanical engineering, mid-market ERP implementations typically take twelve to 24 months, while larger multi-site or corporate-group projects can easily take 30 to 48 months. Migrating complex master data such as multi-level bills of materials and variant structures is often the bottleneck and can take several months on its own. Roughly two thirds of the project duration goes to conceptual design, customising and data migration, with around one third for testing, training and the productive roll-out. Pure cloud standard implementations without deep customising can be considerably faster; step-by-step help is provided by the ERP implementation checklist.
Which functions must an ERP for mechanical engineering cover without fail?
A machinery ERP should work in a project-, order- and variant-oriented way, because the industry is characterised by one-off and small-batch production with a high engineering share. Central elements are a powerful variant configurator with rule-based bill of materials and work plan generation, project and order management with concurrent costing, and production planning and control (PPS) including detailed scheduling for job-shop and assembly manufacturing. Equally important are end-to-end service and spare parts management across the entire lifecycle as well as export processing with customs, preference calculation and foreign trade. Added to this are interfaces to CAD, MES and BDE/MDE (production and machine data capture) systems, so that design engineering and production can interlock cleanly.
What do engineer-to-order, make-to-order and assemble-to-order mean for ERP selection?
The three manufacturing strategies describe how much customer-specific value creation only arises after the order is received, and they place very different demands on the ERP. With make-to-order, production only starts after the order is placed, based on largely defined designs, while with assemble-to-order existing assemblies are assembled into configurable variants for the individual customer. Engineer-to-order goes further: here the product is newly designed or heavily adapted for each order, which is common in special machinery and plant engineering and requires an ERP with close design integration, concurrent costing and project-based control. Companies with a high engineer-to-order share should therefore look specifically at configurator depth, CAD/PLM integration and project controlling; more under variant manufacturing.
How important is integration with CAD and PLM systems?
CAD/PLM integration is a key selection criterion in mechanical engineering because design engineering and the ERP continuously need the same bill of materials and change data. Via bidirectional interfaces, drawings, models and bills of materials from CAD and PLM systems such as Siemens Teamcenter, PTC Windchill or Dassault ENOVIA are transferred to the ERP and kept consistent. Concepts such as the growing bill of materials already pass preliminary requirements to the ERP during the design phase, so that procurement and production can start earlier. Integrated change management also makes transparent how design changes affect deadlines, material and costs, and reduces media discontinuities between engineering and production.