Blog

As a manufacturer, the way you operate and make money is changing. Meeting your customer needs is no longer just about the products you make and how fast you deliver them. You are also increasingly called on to be the service experts and technicians for those products as well. When you want to build a strategy to solve your internal uptime challenges and expand your external se ...

The concept of business expansion takes on several meanings in 2019. Some manufacturers will be poised to expand in a traditional sense, adding plants, employees, and increasing production of current products. Others will expand their business into new product lines, requiring new equipment, skill sets, and suppliers. Even other manufacturers will undergo a technology expansi ...

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm, set out to provide relief to businesses in emerging regions as the 2020 pandemic roiled global markets. Stephanie von Friedeburg, MD and COO of the IFC, looks back on the year in a recent podcast where she reflects the following: “There's been a substantive hit on supply chains, trade shocks. And ...

Whether your company is implementing an ERP system for the first time, or replacing a legacy implementation, it’s critically important to make the right choice. An ERP solution is, at its foundation, a strategic choice. What new capabilities does your organization need and want? What problems are you trying to solve? What do you want your core processes to look like? How can ne ...

Manufacturers everywhere have an extremely underutilized employee. This employee is a robust repository of institutional knowledge, facts, and random trivia. However, this employee is full of latent potential that hasn’t yet been tapped, and they are ready to do so much more. Ok, so maybe this is a quirky metaphor, but—in case it wasn’t clear—this underutilized employee is yo ...

Bayer, the giant German multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company has selected Infor EAM. This will be a blow to SAP, whose ERP Bayer use and Indus, whose EAM software is used at least at one other Bayer site. Once the deployment is successful, Bayer will look to roll out the Infor solution to other sites.  Frontstep, a Channel partner of Infor, has more than 20 y ...

All companies want to experience an ROI on their assets and equipment.  In the realm of fleet management, this is especially true regarding trailers. Purchase price, operating cost, and generation of income are all things to consider. Now, the first point, purchase price must be aligned with what the actual trailer is going to haul—that is what is going to determine if there is ...

According to Gartner, “By 2025, the top four ERP vendors will rebrand themselves as business platform providers.” And, “By 2022, 30% of large enterprises will have moved to a platform- and product-centric approach with standardized ERP capabilities at the platform core.” The trend is clear. The market for ERP platforms and suites for product-centric enterprises is shifting fro ...

Industry 4.0—The Fourth Industrial Revolution—smart technology and factories. Those concepts are probably all pretty familiar. But what about Maintenance 4.0? The story of Industry 4.0 is all about the evolution of manufacturing. Over the past 250 years, manufacturing has traveled the road from mechanization through steam and water power (Industry 1.0) to the use of electricity ...