Equipment companies used to compete mostly on product and price. But that was before customers could get whatever they needed with just a click of a button. With reduced differentiation and diminishing sales margins, equipment companies are shifting the focus beyond product and price to what problems they can solve for their customers. Today’s equipment companies compete on service.
Which means that one of the biggest challenges equipment OEMs, dealers, rental, and service organizations face today is how to increase customer service levels. It’s this push for finding new and better ways to serve customer needs that are at the core of many of the key issues that are impacting the equipment industry today.
Read on for a deep dive into the top issues facing the equipment industry and how addressing these issues can help companies better compete on customer service.
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Topics: Manufacturing, Rentals & Equipment, Equipment, Infor, CloudSuite Equipment Rental, Enterprise Software, CloudSuite Equipment, Infor CloudSuite Equipment
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
What does anywhere operations mean?
Many industries, including manufacturing, pivoted toward a dispersed workforce as they faced COVID-related restrictions for distancing in the workplace. Often, the policies adopted out of necessity also brought unexpected benefits. We discovered that remote workers can still be highly productive, and a distributed infrastructure can still maintain security and reliability. Plus, the ability to connect from anywhere enhances agility, collaboration, and expands the talent pool. Flexibility is valuable to the workforce.
So, why go back to the traditional business model? Many manufacturers are considering this carefully and examining how to retain the best components of remote connectivity without compromising shop floor activities and the fulfilment of customer orders. Technology can help. With modern remote connectivity, employees can stay connected, accessing tools and data and engaging with colleagues and customers from anywhere.
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Topics: Digital Transformation, ERP, Manufacturing, Food & Beverage, Webinar, Process Manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence, Fashion PLM
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
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
To keep up with lofty yet mandatory customer expectations, your supply chain can’t afford to stop investing in technology that improves processes, connects business partners and IoT data, and uses machine learning algorithms to improve business outcomes. If the people tasked with running your supply chain are relying on poorly built or outdated systems filled with data quality issues, then they need new technology solutions and strategies to overcome these shortcomings to create true value.
As you strive to balance cost while simultaneously improve your customer service, you are no doubt confronting issues that require better collaboration amongst your group as well as the numerous companies you interact with daily. The days of each department or company working on an island while hoping groups further downstream can correct any mistakes are long gone.
Nowadays, those of us in the supply chain space realize the need for ongoing collaboration with everyone who touches our supply chain. This can take the form of sharing data around forecasts, inventory positions, capacity plans, order status (both at rest and in-transit), as well as visibility into shipments.
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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Rentals & Equipment, Supply Chain, Fashion & Apparel, Infor M3 ERP, Enterprise Software, Retail Supply Chain, WMS, Supply Chain Management
Competitive supply chains must enable a new level of coordinated performance that creates a high-fidelity picture of in-process flows across your extended network. Building the continuous supply chain supports contextual deviations, conveys alerts and drives continuous planning via sense & respond capabilities.
Optimizing multi-party business processes
Supply chains are complex networks where over 80% of the data and processes sits within partner systems. To see and act on the latest picture of your supply chain, your company needs that data from each of your partners, but the problem is most companies rely solely on an enterprise-centric approach to solve a multi-enterprise problem.
The only way to overcome those limitations is to adopt a "network approach." Connecting all partners to shared processes, data and metrics managed within a single platform creates a single version of truth for all parties. This allows supply chains to eliminate the data silos and inherent latency in order to reduce the root causes of friction, variability and costs in today’s supply chains, both internally and externally.
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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Rentals & Equipment, Supply Chain, Fashion & Apparel, Infor M3 ERP, Enterprise Software, Retail Supply Chain, WMS, Supply Chain Management
I recently posted on LinkedIn to ask my colleagues for advice on how to manage my exploding workload. According to the latest Mental Health Index: U.S. Worker Edition from Total Brain, between November and December there was a 48% increase in the risk of depression—a risk level not seen since this past spring. Further, employees’ focus dropped 62%—a record low since the inception of the research in February 2020. While remote working has its benefits, most of us would argue that we need to make some significant changes for this style of working to be sustainable. Below are a few of the suggestions and ideas from professionals that commented on the post.
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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing, Food & Beverage, Distribution, Rentals & Equipment, Supply Chain, Fashion & Apparel, Infor M3 ERP, Enterprise Software, Retail Supply Chain, WMS, Supply Chain Management
The capabilities gap between older versions of ERP designs and current designs can create a problem that many organizations are slow to fix. If you already have an ERP system in place, but you’re running an older version of it, chances are your ERP is not helping your business to continue to grow and evolve as quickly as you would like. Changing vendors can be as expensive an endeavor as adding an ERP to your organization for the first time. But, if your ERP vendor has continued to make investments in their ERP solution, upgrading your current system—rather than replacing it—presents a very smart option.
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Topics: ERP, Manufacturing
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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