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Manufacturing Day is an annual celebration of modern manufacturing and is meant to inspire the next generation of manufacturers, and occurs the first Friday of October. Created by the Founding Partner Fabricators and the Manufacturers Association in 2012, this event has steadily grown to showcase what manufacturers, like you, do every day to make the things that impact our world.
Metal products like screws and bolts are often seen as a commodity but if you can become a preferred supplier to large OEMs, the opportunity is ripe to take advantage of higher margins. Finding reliable suppliers is a lengthy and tedious process for large OEMs.
Back in 1978, foam products weren’t commonplace in Plymouth, Wisconsin. However, Tecwyn “Tec” Vance Roberts, a local engineer, realized that area industrial and commercial builders could benefit from a foam insulation product. Seeing this opportunity in the market, Tec set out to bring it to them.
Diversified metal component manufacturer JD Norman Industries has a goal to grow. With its main strategy being mergers and acquisitions, that means its manufacturing technology team must rely on an integrated ERP/MES solution that scales with the company, connecting each new operation to the enterprise.
When A&K Finishing, a provider of plastic paint solutions for the automotive, office furniture, electronics, and commercial industries, selected the Plex Manufacturing Cloud as its system of record in 2016, the team expected to see improvements in their scrap rates, inventory management and quality control.
It has almost become a cliché to say that manufacturers are under constant pressure to deliver higher quality products at a lower cost. But this cliché happens to be true—especially in the plastics and rubber sector. Given the sheer breadth of products you manufacture and the seemingly endless number of applications for these products, your target market is complex and constantly changing.
When you think of manufacturing, your mind may not jump directly to a visual of rows of cupcakes and cookies or a seemingly endless batch of cake cruising down a conveyor belt, but wholesale bakeries have all the same challenges as other manufacturers—and then some!
Summer is usually a slower time for manufacturers. In fact, you’ve probably already decided to take some time off and get out of town. Nobody will fault you for that. Everybody needs a break. But before you go, make plans to do something else with your summer: carve out time to gain a better understanding of your business.
You don’t have to look any further than the recent E. coli outbreak caused by romaine lettuce – the worst E. coli outbreak since 2006 – to know that better food safety practices are essential to consumers’ health and wellness. Over the course of several weeks, nearly 200 individuals across 13 states became sick from the contaminated food. Five people have died to date, and nearly 100 were hospitalized.