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Plex Manufacturing Blog
Rethinking Business Innovation at the Cloud Business Summit
I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Times Square in New York City to attend Saugatuck Technology’s one-day executive event, the Cloud Business Summit. The event brought together more than 100 CIOs, CFOs and CMOs from large national enterprises to hear how the convergence of cloud, big data, mobile and social media is “Rethinking Business Innovation.”...
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Big Questions About Big Data
Big data is everywhere. It seems everyone is talking about it, but there’s still so much confusion around it. To top it off, more data is coming in every day, faster than before, and in formats not easily synchronized. Businesses need ways to store it, access it and turn it into a competitive edge. But how?...
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Guest Post: The Turning Tide of Acceptance for Cloud ERP in Manufacturing
Even though cloud ERP has been able to gain traction across most industries and company sizes, manufacturers have been notoriously slow to come on board. Manufacturers were first to utilize ERP itself, but have been somewhat reluctant to move away from what has worked for them in the past. I experienced this firsthand last year when I presented some of my research on cloud ERP to a group of…
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Record-Breaking Implementation, Made Possible by the Plex Manufacturing Cloud
What do you say when an ERP solution is implemented in just a third of the time expected to go live? “Awesome!” “Unbelievable!” “Wow!” Or like the CFO, you might say it “exceeded my expectations” and that you’re “extremely satisfied.”...
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Five Strategies for Becoming a Demand-Driven Manufacturer Using Cloud Computing
It’s time for more manufacturers to question what being demand-driven really means by looking at their businesses the way their customers do. Having accurate forecasting processes, a finely-tuned sales and operations process (S&OP) or being great at new product development and introductions isn’t enough. These are all great attributes, but they must be synchronized into a cohesive strategy…
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Evolution of the IT Department in the Age of the Cloud
There’s no question that the cloud presents a disruptive technology that inevitably leads to rethinking – and often restructuring – the objectives of internal IT departments. An internal IT department – once considered critical to the success of the business enterprise – has, in many cases, become obsolete....
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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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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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