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Plex Manufacturing Blog
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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Mobility Boosts the Data Accessibility Benefits of the Cloud
Automotive manufacturers don’t succeed by standing in place. In an industry focused on motion, today’s suppliers need to apply the same speed and agility to their manufacturing operations that they expect from the products they build....
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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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