Announcement
Now Available!
Get your copy of the 7th Annual State of Smart Manufacturing and hear from 300+ manufacturers in this new survey report!
High Tech & Electronics
Plex Manufacturing Blog
What Shop Floor Data Should You Collect?
As Industry 4.0 becomes more of a reality, smart manufacturers are looking for those precious insights promised by the industry analysts. But manufacturers have been collecting so much data for so long, it’s hard to know what to use and how to convert it into usable information....
Read More
5 Reasons to Attend PowerPlex 2020
PowerPlex, the annual user conference that brings together manufacturers from around the globe, is set to take place May 12-14, 2020 in Detroit. If you haven’t already heard the news, early bird registration opened today. If you’re not familiar with PowerPlex, this nearly 20-year-old conference has annually been the gathering place for manufacturing and technology leaders well before “smart…
Read More
Government Funding for Canadian Manufacturing Businesses: A Proactive Approach
Manufacturers in Canada are often the primary recipients for government funding, as manufacturing grants tend to be more widely available than for any other industry segment, making industrial companies well-aligned to access financial incentives....
Read More
FABTECH: What We Are Learning from Our Manufacturing Leaders
When you think of metal stamping and fabrication, you might not immediately think about the industry’s use of cutting-edge technology with precision metal design. But the fact of the matter is, the smart application of manufacturing technology is a key trait among manufacturers that succeed....
Read More
3 Key Technologies to Focus on for Industry 4.0
It’s no secret Industry 4.0 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will influence the industry for years to come. This cyber-physical evolution is changing the way manufacturers make things, serve customers, run their plants, and do business....
Read More
Scary Stories to Tell on the Shop Floor
With Halloween around the corner, spooky stories aren’t far behind. But, for manufacturing professionals, the scariest season might not be limited to October 31st alone. Terror can take on a whole new meaning when it comes to nightmares on the shop floor. Here are the top phrases that might leave any plant manager with a legacy ERP system quaking....
Read More
Shopping for a Manufacturing ERP? Consider Your Deployment Options
Make no mistake about it: ERP is a major investment for any manufacturer. The new solution you choose may be Command Central for your employees for the next eight to 10 years—or longer. Many manufacturers begin their ERP research by looking into industry-specific features and functionality. ...
Read More
How to Double the Size of Your Business While Cutting Scrap
f you’ve noticed the sheer number of electric vehicles on the road today, you can imagine how quickly manufacturers within this industry are growing. One company in particular, Eurotranciatura Mexico recently doubled the size of its business in just a two-year period. ...
Read More
Will Jobs Be Lost to Automation?
Product and technology innovation has transformed life as we know it in the last few decades, and the pace of change is only getting faster over the next decade. Inventors and innovators continue to look for ways to make life easier, automate repetitive tasks, and remove the likelihood of human error by teaching machines to do what humans would otherwise do. ...
Read More
3 Reasons Why Real-Time Information Matters to Manufacturers
In order to make timely decisions, you need access to timely data. Unfortunately, for many manufacturers, the shop floor is a black box that is disconnected from the enterprise systems they rely on, so they must depend on reports. Those reports may take hours to prepare by specialists after manually being entered into a system from the paper that originally collected the data. The result is that…
Read More
Manufacturers: Unlock the Value of Industry Analysts
At a time when technology buyers are bombarded with software options from all angles, it can be difficult to determine which ones are legit and which ones you should avoid when you’re trying to select an ERP, MES, or Industrial IoT solution vendor....
Read More
How to Optimize your Manufacturing Workforce
It is increasingly challenging to stand up a workforce of skilled operators, but by automating error-prone tasks and operationalizing your procedures, you can mitigate the risk to production and the business. Easy-to-use tools with built-in error-proofing make it easy for your workforce to do the right thing—because it’s the easy thing to do....
Read More
3 Key Steps to Buying the Right ERP for Your Manufacturing Business
We’re not going to dance around it: buying a new ERP solution for your manufacturing business is a big deal. It’s a long, involved process. It requires buy-in from a diverse group of stakeholders. It involves a major investment (both in time and money). And you’ll have to live with the results for perhaps a decade or more....
Read More
Quality 4.0 and the Industrial IoT
Quality is one of the top concerns of most manufacturers. End customers demand quality products so OEMs demand quality performance all the way down their supply chains. There’s no tolerance for delivering anything but a quality product....
Read More
Demystifying IIoT: Terms Every Manufacturer Should Know
By now, you’ve heard a lot about the industrial Internet of things (IIoT). It’s a network of always-connected things and systems that produce a steady stream of data, which can generate compelling synergistic analytics that could be used to increase the overall efficiency of a manufacturing operation among other things. ...
Read More
Making Sense of MES and MOM
If you’re serious about improving your manufacturing operations and have shopped around for systems to help you achieve your goals, you’ve probably run into two commonly used terms: manufacturing execution system (MES), and manufacturing operations management (MOM). Just when you learned what MES meant, you probably discovered that MOM means basically the same thing....
Read More
Industrial IoT and the Pragmatic Manufacturer: Lessons Learned from Prime Day 2019
There is quite a lot of hype surrounding the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) within the manufacturing industry. Large-scale Industrial IoT pilots driven by enterprise-focused technology companies paint pictures of fully-connected and automated plants, complete with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) that promise ROI but require large early investments of time and capital…
Read More
Cloud Manufacturing Software: Understanding SaaS Solution Availability
Cloud-based software is all around us. From the social networks you use to connect with family, to the app that you use to pay your friend back for lunch, the cloud enables the technology that we rely upon to process incredible amounts of data....
Read More
Canada APMA 2019: Survival of the Fastest—and Most Adaptive
I recently had the privilege of speaking at Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturer’s Association (APMA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Windsor, Ontario and what struck me was the amount of change happening within this industry. One example of this is for the first, time conference organizers added an entire day to the schedule dedicated to technology....
Read More
3 Things About ERP Implementations Most Manufacturers Don’t Know
A recent survey conducted by Mint Jutras and commissioned by Ultra Consultants looked at ERP implementations—whether they are doomed to fail or whether ROI expectations are high enough. For small- to mid-sized manufacturers, ERP is an endeavor that becomes necessary as the business grows since managing a complex operation with spreadsheets is unsustainable....
Read More