Manufacturing IT systems are often selected on the basis of projected ROI and evaluated in terms of achieved ROI. And with good reason, for in today's business climate no manufacturer can afford to make any investment if it doesn’t deliver solid business benefits, whether that investment is £10k, £100k or £1million.

This lack of an accurate starting point for ROI comparisons is further compounded by the increasingly multi-disciplinary and interconnected nature of modern manufacturing.

Mike Novels, CEO of leading planning and scheduling software author Preactor International elaborates. "Measuring ROI is hard enough when you only have one system or process to deal with but the majority of Preactor customers already have an ERP system in place. Our planning and scheduling software invariably integrates with existing ERP software in addition to other Manufacturing IT solutions in order to deliver the required levels of detailed planning and scheduling typically absent in the first place. A lot of the benefits Preactor brings to the end user therefore come from performance gains achieved by helping any existing ERP investment to work more efficiently and more effectively."