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Plex Manufacturing Blog
Rethinking Business Innovation at the Cloud Business Summit
I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Times Square in New York City to attend Saugatuck Technology’s one-day executive event, the Cloud Business Summit. The event brought together more than 100 CIOs, CFOs and CMOs from large national enterprises to hear how the convergence of cloud, big data, mobile and social media is “Rethinking Business Innovation.”...
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Big Questions About Big Data
Big data is everywhere. It seems everyone is talking about it, but there’s still so much confusion around it. To top it off, more data is coming in every day, faster than before, and in formats not easily synchronized. Businesses need ways to store it, access it and turn it into a competitive edge. But how?...
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Guest Post: The Turning Tide of Acceptance for Cloud ERP in Manufacturing
Even though cloud ERP has been able to gain traction across most industries and company sizes, manufacturers have been notoriously slow to come on board. Manufacturers were first to utilize ERP itself, but have been somewhat reluctant to move away from what has worked for them in the past. I experienced this firsthand last year when I presented some of my research on cloud ERP to a group of…
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Record-Breaking Implementation, Made Possible by the Plex Manufacturing Cloud
What do you say when an ERP solution is implemented in just a third of the time expected to go live? “Awesome!” “Unbelievable!” “Wow!” Or like the CFO, you might say it “exceeded my expectations” and that you’re “extremely satisfied.”...
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Five Strategies for Becoming a Demand-Driven Manufacturer Using Cloud Computing
It’s time for more manufacturers to question what being demand-driven really means by looking at their businesses the way their customers do. Having accurate forecasting processes, a finely-tuned sales and operations process (S&OP) or being great at new product development and introductions isn’t enough. These are all great attributes, but they must be synchronized into a cohesive strategy…
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Evolution of the IT Department in the Age of the Cloud
There’s no question that the cloud presents a disruptive technology that inevitably leads to rethinking – and often restructuring – the objectives of internal IT departments. An internal IT department – once considered critical to the success of the business enterprise – has, in many cases, become obsolete....
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Finding the Right Talent for Your Culture
I was recently invited to speak at the Elite Suite Series, an event hosted by the 101 Best & Brightest Places to Work organization. (Bragging alert: For three years running, Plex has been named an “Elite” winner for employee enrichment, engagement and retention at the Metropolitan Detroit’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For annual awards competition.)...
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Guest Post: Analytics vs. Intelligence – Do You Know the Difference?
Business analytics is often the next evolutionary step after business intelligence (BI), which is all about convenient access to enterprise information in a form that is useful to executives and managers. As I had discussed in a previous blog post, the goal of a useful BI system is to help an organization collect, maintain, and organize business data to develop strategy and build a competitive…
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Common Concerns About Running a Manufacturing Business in the Cloud: What is the Reality?
Many people assume that high performance real-time manufacturing processes require an on-premise solution and are not a natural fit for the cloud. In a manufacturing firm, everything starts from the plant floor – so the core Manufacturing Execution System, well integrated into the rest of the enterprise solution(s), is critical....
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Why Now is the Time to Move to Cloud ERP
Manufacturing has changed forever. Manufacturing businesses face intense competitive pressures. Dynamic supply chains and hyper-accelerated production cycles are just a few of the factors that require them to minimize costs, improve productivity and speed time-to-market....
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Why Customer Commitment Gets Far More Than Lip Service in the Cloud
“The customer is king.” “The customer is No. 1.” Most organizations brag about their commitment to the customer — to the point where I suspect many people have become skeptical of these kinds of statements. This is especially true in business technology, where customers historically have found it hard to get the great service they were initially promised....
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Guest Post: 350 Million Transactions - What Does It Mean in Manufacturing?
Critics who question the growth of the cloud delivery model will likely be stopped in their tracks when they hear about one of our recent manufacturing milestones. Manufacturers who use Kors Engineering’s MACH2 product to automate cloud transactions with plant floor machines through programmable logic controllers (PLCs) have now cumulatively managed more than 350 million plant floor transactions…
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Manufacturing Enterprise Technology: The Best Is Yet to Come
This week, I have the privilege of welcoming several hundred Plex customers to PowerPlex, our company’s 12th annual user conference in Columbus, Ohio. We’re engaging in many of the typical user conference activities – introducing new features, training on existing product functions and networking. But the spirit in the air is far from typical for a user conference....
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Guest Post: Increasing Employee Engagement Through Increased Operations Visibility
There is a lot of interest in visibility these days, and rightly so. Visibility throughout the enterprise and to the far reaches of the supply chain is becoming more and more pervasive through the evolution of sensors, RFID, Internet connectivity, cellular technology, location services (GPS) and even the Internet of Things — which recognizes that nearly everything can and will be visible and…
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Technology and Growth: Which Is the Chicken and Which Is the Egg?
American manufacturing is definitely bouncing back. This year’s growth is expected to exceed both 2012 rates and GDP increases. There’s no question that things are looking up. There’s also no doubt that manufacturers are exploring new tools to manage growth, including advanced technologies....
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Guest Post: Can You Afford Unprofitable Customers and Products?
During a visit to a local manufacturing company, I learned that the company had recently undergone a difficult transition. After taking a close look at their business and their customers, it had become obvious that margins were significantly different between one group and another. Some products and customers were profitable to serve; others, not so much....
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Read Between the Lines: The Importance of Barcoding in Manufacturing Processes
When is the last time you saw a barcode label on a product? Last night at the grocery store? On a magazine you read the other day? Do you even notice them anymore? If you’re in manufacturing, you most definitely notice them. The codes on the thousands of labels you see each day tell you everything you need to know about the parts your organization receives, produces and ships....
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Ongoing ERP Training Prevents Brain Drain
Have you experienced brain drain within your organization when skilled employees left, resulting in knowledge gaps? If this is your problem, we have the solution. The best way to combat brain drain is to engage your organization in ongoing ERP training....
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Guest Post: What Are We Reshoring?
We live in a global market. But when it comes to unskilled assembly-type jobs with a high labor content, let’s be honest: These are gone from the U.S. forever. Any of this kind of work that comes back to North America will only be because automation removes the labor content, since our robots can perform “manual” labor cheaper and more reliably than untrained or unskilled workers in other parts…
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In Supply Chain Management, Transparency Is the New Normal
While supply chain management is often considered its own function within the manufacturing enterprise, effective supply chain communication is critical to virtually every area of the business. But old-school relationships between OEMs and tier suppliers were often marred by distrust, suspicion and adversity. ...
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