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Production Management
Plex Manufacturing Blog
Solving the Downtime Riddle
Riddles. They’re mysterious, mind-bending puzzles that throw in an element of misdirection to throw you off course. They can be fun and even educational in your personal life, but riddles are not a puzzle piece you want to see in your manufacturing environment....
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Utilizing Automation in Manufacturing Processes: The Future Is Here
Driven by the rapid growth of technology, automation in manufacturing processes has significantly evolved over the years. Where traditional manufacturing was once utterly manual, more and more manual functions were reinvented with automated production. This included innovation in conveyance, limit switches, and eventually programmable logic controllers....
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Understanding the Impact of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Calculation
So, you’ve decided to embark on an overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) project to increase equipment effectiveness and develop process improvements that maximize efficiencies. You’ve got your spreadsheets and clipboards ready (you don’t really need those, but more on that later). You’re ready to go. Now what?...
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Monitoring, Tracing, and Tracking Manufacturing Processes: What’s the Difference?
The rise of cloud-based software and advanced analytics has helped manufacturers drill further into Lean and Six Sigma methodologies that improve efficiency and lower costs....
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How OEE and Manufacturing Software Improves Efficiency
“Efficiency” is a broad term in manufacturing. It means producing or doing something while using the least time, resources, and energy. For companies like yours, that may encompass efficiency of motion, the effectiveness of training, the quality of SOPs, or inventory accuracy. But it’s when all those components are working together that operations achieve their highest efficiency....
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5 Steps for Improving Your Product Quality
Everyone knows that poor quality can cause headaches that ripple throughout an organization, but not every manufacturer approaches (or even defines) quality the same way. Quality improvement strategies are as old as manufacturing itself, and yet achieving success in this area continues to be a challenge for many in the industry. Done right, and your quality concerns will be reduced to a minimal…
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Inventory Valuation Methods – Which One Works for You?
If you don’t know what you’ve got, you don’t know what you can make. While simple, this statement sums up the importance of inventory accounting in any business. But the value of inventory is just as significant. While accurate unit counts mean actual performance will match the production schedule, inventory valuation affects many areas within the company....
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The Role of Quality Assurance in Manufacturing
What’s your quality management system like? It’s a simple question, but the answer can be complicated. Most manufacturers say they have a system in place, but what does that really entail? After all, some quality systems are based on manual, rudimentary processes while others leverage automated, cutting-edge innovations. Regardless of the level of sophistication, any quality management system…
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Periodic vs. Perpetual Inventory: What’s the Difference?
Get this - U.S. businesses carried $2,069.5 billion of inventory through July of 2021. That’s a 16.3% compared to 2020 when inventories were depleted during the early days of COVID. Further, business-to-sales ratio for inventory is 1.25, the lowest point since 2012 and reflective of the boom caused by pent-up demand....
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Production Monitoring Software: Turning Insight into Action
You can't fix what you can't see. Without access to and analysis of the data resulting from production, manufacturers risk higher costs, poor quality, and mysteriously low equipment utilization. And with global manufacturing competition at an all-time high due to disruption, trade wars, COVID-19, and other issues, companies just can't afford to be in the dark about what's going on in their…
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