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Smart Manufacturing
Plex Manufacturing Blog
Your 5 Steps to Smart Manufacturing Adoption
Smart manufacturing enables manufacturers like you to adapt to a changing market and unlock long-term opportunities by connecting and automating their business. But where do you start? With increasingly modular smart manufacturing technology options available, investment and implementation can be simple, seamless, and cost-effective. These incremental investments unlock value quickly and can be…
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Solving the Downtime Riddle
Riddles. They’re mysterious, mind-bending puzzles that throw in an element of misdirection to throw you off course. They can be fun and even educational in your personal life, but riddles are not a puzzle piece you want to see in your manufacturing environment....
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The Top 3 Challenges Facing Manufacturers (and How to Solve Them)
Each year, the State of Smart Manufacturing Report compiles feedback from hundreds of manufacturers. For nearly a decade, these findings have shown supply chain disruption, skilled worker shortage, and security/risk management as top challenges for business and the pandemic has made this worse....
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9 Reasons for More Visibility in Your Manufacturing Plant
Imagine putting on a pair of glasses that lets you see transparent, operational measurements in real time floating across your production line. With more and more companies embracing Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing methods, that level of visibility inside an industrial environment is now a major key to a successful operation....
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Key Takeaways From the 7th Annual State of Smart Manufacturing Report
Responding to market adversity with agility, improved processes, and technology adoption Welcome to the 2022 State of Smart Manufacturing Report, the most robust edition yet. Based on surveys from 321 manufacturers from across the globe, the results reflect general consistency in major factors impacting manufacturers....
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Smarter, Together: Connecting Customer Influence to Positive Business Outcomes (Part 4 of 4)
In earlier posts of this series, we talked about Plex’s core principles of customer influence, how we approach influence, and how we capture it:...
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Smarter, Together: Measuring Customer Influence at Plex (Part 3 of 4)
In the first post of this series, we explored the concept of customer influence that permeates the culture here at Plex - how we and our customers influence one another through open dialog and feedback using four essential actions: focus, listen, share, and engage. The second post discussed the platforms in which Plex captures this valuable customer input – the purpose of which is to deliver…
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How OEE and Manufacturing Software Improves Efficiency
“Efficiency” is a broad term in manufacturing. It means producing or doing something while using the least time, resources, and energy. For companies like yours, that may encompass efficiency of motion, the effectiveness of training, the quality of SOPs, or inventory accuracy. But it’s when all those components are working together that operations achieve their highest efficiency....
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Electricity, Sustainability, and Robots: Lessons from CES 2022
Last week I attended the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Vegas, marking the fourth time in six years that a member of R&D has attended the high-tech event. While CES is primarily a consumer-oriented show, the technologies cutting their teeth in the consumer market often end up in the enterprise, or on the shop floor, so CES is critical to our forward-thinking plans and initiatives at Plex…
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Smarter, Together: How Plex Customers Influence Product Direction (Part 2 of 4)
In the first post of this series, I discussed the definition of influence - adapting behavior, products, and processes based on communication, information, and shared understanding - and the four ways that Plex approaches customer influence. Here in part two, I’m going to dive into how we capture and eventually measure it. Importantly, there is no ‘one metric to rule them all’....
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