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Supply Chain
Plex Manufacturing Blog
Unlocking Supply Chain Success: 6 Tips for Seamless Implementation
Supply chain planning solutions offer incredible opportunities over their predecessors. Today, most are cloud-based, automatically updated, and easy to customize to specific industries. The best solutions provide advanced analytics to deliver real-time insights and reporting to those who need them. ...
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Overcoming Challenges to Becoming a Supply Chain Leader
Complex manufacturing environments can be difficult to navigate. Pressures unique to each industry, constant fluctuations in demand, and disruption on an unprecedented scale make these settings even more challenging. Over time, these issues can take their toll on supply chain management. ...
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Forecasting and Demand Planning in the Age of Machine Learning
Companies use a variety of tools to assess the current state of their business and predict where it is headed. By “reading the tea leaves”, planners attempt to ensure correct stock levels, optimize inventory levels and inventory value, and provide a framework for staffing and operations.But the complexity of modern-day supply chains requires that forecasting and planning be more than just reading…
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Will It Go Round in Circles?
Many have heard the 1972 song by Billy Preston called Will It Go Round in Circles?It was a catchy tune, but if you listen to the words, you realize the singer had no idea if his suggestions would work or “go round in circles.”Others have wondered the same thing about a more recent trend called the circular economy. Since its conception, most have considered the concept aspirational rather than…
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From Reactive to Proactive: Big Data Analytics & Supply Chain Management
Traditional supplier management consisted of spreadsheets, planner experience, and a lot of guesswork.Decisions were made based on dated, error-prone information and human analysis using spreadsheets or old standalone software.This reality forced companies into a reactive position. Because data was compiled and analyzed after events had occurred, there was little planning professionals could do…
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Improve Your Improvements by Digitizing Processes
In traditional manufacturing, continuous improvement was a misnomer. It wasn't that practitioners were insincere or wrong. But manual processes, data acquisition, and analysis, created hard limits to what the most zealous continuous improvement methodologies could achieve....
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Contents May Settle, But You Don't Have To
Everyone has experienced the disappointment of opening a bag of chips or crackers and looking inside only to see half-empty space. Often, the product contains the cryptic warning "Caution: Contents May Have Settled."Visually, this isn't very pleasant, but everyone knows the content volume is the same. It's just the space between the products affected by the journey from factory to retail shelf.…
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Digital Building Blocks for Quality
Automotive manufacturers operate in a hyper-competitive industry, producing complex pieces of equipment that have, on average, over 30,000 parts. Manufacturing them comes with substantial uncertainty due to quickly shifting consumer tastes—and the unwavering expectation for high quality....
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Digital Building Blocks for Your Enterprise
From the most straightforward shed to the highest skyscraper, every structure is built with a complex assortment of components. These “building blocks” give the structure support and strength and allow it to be used as designed.As manufacturing industries rapidly adopt Industry 4.0 technologies to create smart and fully digital manufacturing systems, companies are realizing that digital building…
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Digital Building Blocks for Sustainability: Part 2
There is increasing interest in reducing carbon emissions as part of overall sustainability. This particularly applies to manufacturing where both awareness and regulations are encouraging producers to explore ways to mitigate or eliminate their emissions.Continuing our discussion of sustainability as a digital building block in manufacturing, let's look at how software can help monitor, track,…
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