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Navigating The Winds Of Change: Unveiling Manufacturing Trends In 2024

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Feb 9, 2024 8:00:00 AM

In the ever-evolving manufacturing realm, few sectors witness transformations as swift and constant. The perpetual evolution of consumer preferences shapes the landscape, the consistent disruption brought by innovative technologies, fluctuating regulatory frameworks, and the regular transformation of business models. Adapting to these unceasing shifts in the market has become necessary, requiring organizations to embody a heightened sense of agility.

Andrew Kinder, Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy with our partner, Infor, recently described how we find ourselves amidst the most volatile and uncertain period in recent memory. In this environment of compounded uncertainty, agility is not just an ideal trait but an absolute imperative for maintaining competitiveness.

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management Systems, Supply Chain Network, Industrial Manufacturing, Cloud BI, Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Software, WMS, Infor Partner

The Importance Of Speaking Your Language In Manufacturing

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Aug 21, 2023 2:26:01 PM

As the manufacturing world continues to evolve to meet new challenges, there’s a step-change in innovation for the products and services that are delivered and supported. Many industry insiders are expressing the need for a focus on driving sustainable (and profitable) business growth. Deloitte suggests digital investment and supply chain resilience as the key pillars. Partnerships are also increasingly important to achieving sustainable business growth, whether that’s upstream or downstream within your supply chain or enabling partners such as application and technology providers.

In all of those partnering scenarios, it’s important to have a common understanding of your desired outcomes, so you can ensure you’re all speaking the same language, which helps shorten the time to value. Manufacturing is shifting towards industry-specific applications and these applications are now nearly always delivered in the cloud to maximize adoption, flexibility, availability, and security, as well as reducing through-life cost of ownership. In fact, Gartner forecasts end-user public cloud spending to grow by 18% through 2021.

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Process Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Supply Chain Visibility, Supply Chain Network, Industrial Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing, Cloud BI, Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Software, Infor CloudSuite M3, Infor CloudSuite ERP

Warehouse Future Proofing With A Cloud-Based WMS

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Jul 7, 2023 12:51:23 PM

Even when your warehouse operations seem to be running smoothly, there is always room for improvement and a need to stay up to date with innovation. While steps are taken to keep warehouse operations at peak performance, when fulfilment times and levels are jeopardized, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back on track are taken correctly so that product can make its way out the door, and time is always working against you.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of moving your warehouse management system (WMS) to the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different with new challenges emerging over the past several months. By empowering critical systems like a WMS with cloud capabilities, your organization can scale quickly, maximize productivity, and minimize outages and downtime to prevent bringing the company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

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Topics: Digital Transformation, ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Rentals & Equipment, Warehouse Management Systems, Fashion & Apparel, Industrial Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing, Infor M3 ERP, Enterprise Software, Retail Supply Chain, WMS

Questions Manufacturers Should Look For Digital Transformation Success

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Oct 6, 2022 2:42:46 PM

1. Are we organizationally ready for significant change?

Organizations are only as good as their people, and manufacturers must look carefully at whether they have the right people and culture to support a different way of doing things. It is the people who will be responsible for implementing change, and they should be ready, committed, and on board with any type of transformation plan.

An organization’s culture can make or break a digital transformation project and “organizational change management” is one of the key components of such a project. Organizations should aim for an inclusive culture where people feel like they are key contributors to the company’s future success.

To achieve this, management teams should encourage a culture of openness to help employees step forward with their ideas. All change, and all transformation, starts with an idea – so it’s important for people to feel empowered to put their ideas out in the open.

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Topics: Digital Transformation, ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Rentals & Equipment, Supply Chain, Fashion & Apparel, Industrial Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing, Infor M3 ERP, Enterprise Software, Retail Supply Chain, WMS, Supply Chain Management

Importance Of Digital Transformation Projects: Start With Your People

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Jul 27, 2022 1:57:31 PM

Know you want to transform but don't know where to start? Want to gain $9-12 for every dollar you spend? Read on to find out why starting with your people is the best first step to prioritizing digital transformation projects.

Digital transformation is at the top of the to-do lists of most companies, but one topic that is often missing from a discussion on digital transformation is which areas to prioritize. Most businesses can’t afford to completely overhaul a core function of the enterprise top to bottom, along with the technology that supports it, at any one time. Instead, they’ll target specific areas for transformation. That approach minimizes disruption to the business, keeps costs manageable, and helps the business apply lessons learned to future transformation projects. The question, though, is which areas to target first?

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Topics: Digital Transformation, ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Rentals & Equipment, Supply Chain, Fashion & Apparel, Industrial Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing, Infor M3 ERP, Enterprise Software, Retail Supply Chain, WMS, Supply Chain Management

Shorten The Distance To Your Customers Using Smart Network Factory

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Jul 1, 2022 8:07:34 AM

Judging by the headlines, continuous logistics issues, continued pandemic restrictions, and rising prices for raw materials will mean that manufacturers have their work cut out for 2022. In addition, the drive towards sustainability is adding pressure to readjust the manufacturing footprint. Most manufacturers are still stuck with a geographic footprint, which was driven by labor arbitrage around the globe, rather than by factors such as closeness to customers or ecological concerns.

To increase efficiency, many producers have started to implement Industry 4.0 technologies. Industry 4.0 came with the promise of a smart factory being profitable at the production lot size of one unit. The concept was introduced at the brink of the millennium change with the introduction of cyber-physical systems to share, analyze and guide intelligent actions for various processes in the industry to make the machines smarter and to lower downtime. Analytics can also be used for other aspects like logistics, demand forecasts, production scheduling and quality control, capacity utilization and efficiency boosting.

But we still stand at the beginning for leveraging the true potential of Industry 4.0. Smart technologies offer no less than the possibility to redesign the global manufacturing footprint, to position factories closer to markets, reduce logistics nightmares and increase visibility of the ecosystem partners, including suppliers and customers.

 

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Industrial Manufacturing, CloudSuite Industrial, Digital Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, Industrial Revolution, Infor Cloudsuite Industrial, CloudSuite Equipment, Infor CloudSuite ERP

Why Manufacturers Should Invest In A Modern ERP

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Jun 3, 2022 9:03:29 AM

Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are helping businesses around the globe—including your competitors—revolutionize their operations. Manufacturing companies of all sizes are adopting technology that is industry-specific and designed to better manage business processes on an integrated and real-time basis.

Technologically advanced ERP systems are an investment in your company’s operations, efficiency, intelligence, and productivity. Every feature of a modern ERP system ultimately ties back to these improvements, which enable your organization to become more productive, more competitive, and better positioned to meet your customers’ needs.

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Equipment, Warehouse Management Systems, Industrial Manufacturing, Enterprise Resource Planning, Enterprise Software

Learn How Industry & Role-Specific Analytics Can Increase Analytics Adoption

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Apr 13, 2022 9:42:52 AM

Traditionally, almost all business intelligence and analytics solutions were designed as general-purpose platforms or desktop tools suitable for any industry, department, or use case. That does mean, of course, that the burden of developing data models, data pipelines, dashboards, and reports falls to the customer. They effectively start with a 'blank sheet of paper,' which, in theory, can be developed to fit the organization's exact needs. However, the reality is that the organization may not have either the skills, resources, or time to develop an analytics solution that quickly meets business requirements.

The answer to avoiding this overhead of entirely homegrown analytics is to use a modern analytic application that can deliver ready-to-use analytics, right "out-of-the-box." Deployment and adoption of these analytic applications are accelerated because of built-in content developed by industry domain experts that understand the industries, roles, data, business applications, and specific analytics required by typical business user personas. A significant amount of development time can be saved because this domain-expertise-driven content can replace typical internal development processes.

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Process Manufacturing, Industrial Manufacturing, Digital Manufacturing, Business Intelligence, Cloud BI, Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Software, Business Processes, Infor CloudSuite M3, Infor CloudSuite ERP

Importance Of Collaborative SCN Increases For Automotive Manufacturers

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Apr 1, 2022 11:31:03 AM

Automotive manufacturers and their suppliers continue to increase their collaboration in various ways, whether this be through robotic process automation (RPA), data collection and exchange, or other methods that provide insights for scalability. With true, multi-enterprise collaboration, there are cross-training opportunities to convey customer needs and preferences for product innovation, giving manufacturers the ability to make rapid adjustments in real time. Collaborative behavior makes this happen, and it all starts with transparency.

However, building real trust, collaboration, and transparency goes beyond using a specific technology or workflow. At its core, this is about changing the culture of automotive OEMs and throughout their suppliers at every tier. Automotive companies who are true leaders in the industry consider the health of the entire supply network, not just their immediate interests. Making this change—as with almost all substantive transformations—requires change be from the top executive level down.

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Supply Chain, Supply Chain Visibility, Supply Chain Network, Industrial Manufacturing, Cloud BI, Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Software, Supply Chain Operations, Supply Chain Management, Infor CloudSuite M3, Infor CloudSuite ERP

Infor CloudSuite M3 - Monitor Late P.O. Lines From Your Homepage

Posted by Harriet Schneider on Jun 29, 2021 8:00:00 AM

Your Tips & Trips delivered today by our very own Mr. M3, Sean Conner. In just under 3 minutes, he demonstrates configuring a drill back.

Click Here to watch how you can monitor late purchase order lines from your homepage.

About Infor's market-leading ERP

Infor’s industry-specific ERP solutions have been meeting the needs of enterprise-level and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) for 30+ years. Infor® ERP cloud software is securely hosted through Amazon Web Services® (AWS®), allowing your business to quickly scale and spend less time managing infrastructure and more time focusing on strategic initiatives.

Built for your industry. Take advantage of 90% of industry-specific capabilities built in, so your business can focus on developing the processes that make it unique.

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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Food & Beverage, Distribution, Fashion & Apparel, Industrial Manufacturing, Infor M3 ERP, Infor CloudSuite M3

About ICCG

Welcome to our Blog - ICCG Insights!

Embracing thought leadership as a pathway for growth, represents the true spirit of progressive change that will make a difference in technology-driven industries. As a consulting company, ICCG customers look to us as their value-added resource. They expect us to be proactive about solving their immediate challenges and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. It is this that drives us to share our best practices, knowledge-base, years of experience, and tried and true methodologies. These have been the hallmarks of our corporate brand.

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