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Plex Manufacturing Blog
What is Connected Manufacturing and Why Should You Care About It?
Manufacturing is increasingly becoming part of the digital economy. Even if you are doing good as a business, you still need to respond to the changes taking place in your industry: shop floor (industrial) automation, additive manufacturing, lot sizes of one, cloud computing, analytics, mobility, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Because if you don’t, you risk losing your competitive…
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5 Steps to Gain Organizational Buy-In for Your ERP Project
When your company has determined that it’s the right time to look at an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the first question that typically pops up goes like this: “Is our investment justified?” In other words, you’ll need to go about getting buy-in across your company because ERP touches every facet of your company. From our experience, this effort involves a few steps that are…
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5 Operational Challenges Manufacturers Can Address with Connected Manufacturing
You grapple with operational challenges every day. It’s the nature of manufacturing with so many variables that go into making products. Getting a handle on these challenges is also do or die, because production must continue to meet customer demands. So, you do whatever is necessary to get inventory under control, respond to audits, reduce waste, and manage quality....
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Mobility in Manufacturing Offers New Opportunities on the Shop Floor
The days of documenting inventory or production data on paper, collecting it, and manually collating it are over—at least they should be. Unfortunately, many manufacturers still rely on manual processes, when the combination of mobility and cloud provide a better alternative....
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Mobility Puts Power at Manufacturers’ Fingertips
A recent industry study validated the importance of mobile devices in manufacturing, uncovering that 90% of manufacturers already use mobile phones, laptops and scanners, and an additional 30% plan to deploy consumer tablets. Mobility is simply part of the current and future connected manufacturing environment. But why?...
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Technology Advancements Impacting Your Manufacturing Business Right Now
There are major technology advancements that have made today’s economy more connected than ever before. Whether you recognize these technologies or not, they will have an impact on your business. Your competition may already be ahead of you in taking advantage of these, but you can put yourself in the driver's seat to steer your business in the right direction....
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Manufacturing Chaos to Calm: Operationalize Quality
When it comes to quality management, our friends at the fictitious Edge Manufacturing are grappling with lack of visibility and control. Edge manages quality control on paper. So, it’s hard to verify whether quality procedures have taken place in a timely manner or whether operators just check boxes to move materials onto the next step to avoid production halts. ...
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Manufacturing Chaos to Calm: Gaining Control Over Inventory
Edge Manufacturing is in a bind. Their largest customer, ABC Corporation, just ordered 210 solar-powered attic fans to be delivered by the end of this month—ABC’s biggest order ever. Edge’s inventory manager, Jim, isn’t sure the warehouse has enough raw material to fill that many orders. And, there’s only one way to find out: pull up spreadsheets....
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Here’s How to Build Your Team of Plex Champions
The Plex Manufacturing Cloud enables you to dramatically reduce the burden on your IT staff, infuse quality throughout production, and gain an incredible amount of visibility and control. It essentially becomes the technology foundation for transforming your business. ...
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Active Planning at Plex and How Manufacturers Can Leverage It Too
Most businesses do planning and budgeting using spreadsheets. Everyone knows how to use them and they provide a good enough tool but, they are error-prone and time-consuming when it comes to sharing and collaboration. Links get broken and formulas have to be manually copied and pasted. Not a great solution when business moves at light speed or when things change, and they always do....
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