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Plex Manufacturing Blog
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. ...
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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. ...
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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…
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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....
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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....
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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....
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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. ...
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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....
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Hausbeck Pickles Leverages Data-Driven Quality Management
Hausbeck Pickle Co. produces an average 400,000 pounds of pickles or peppers a day for some of the world’s largest fast food restaurants including Subway, Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Taco Bell, and KFC. The nearly 100-year-old company headquartered in Michigan also manages 900 50,000-pound tanks for brining pickles. For every 33,000 lbs....
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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....
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