Articles

Manufacturing

Anne Sexton
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4 Steps to Streamline Global Shipping

For global manufacturers, managing logistics and carriers across locations, countries, and regions is no easy task, particularly given the current unpredictable business environment. But while shippers can’t control fickle global relations, they need not be at their mercy.

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Pete Butler
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Filling the Manufacturing Skills Gap

The manufacturing skills gap may leave a projected 2.4 million positions open in the coming decade, with a potential economic impact of $2.5 trillion. How can manufacturers prepare and fill positions with qualified individuals? What training and ongoing education strategies will enable the necessary skills? Predictive analytics and machine learning can eliminate the guesswork in […]

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John Carroll
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Simplifying the Sophisticated Warehouse To Drive Efficiency – Serco Entrematic

As the equipment and resources in warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and distribution centers become more technologically complex and sophisticated, well-designed processes and systems can help build a simplified, straightforward operation that is safer and more efficient. Q: How can shippers, especially those in retail and high-volume distribution, accommodate the increasing demands of e-commerce with their warehouse […]

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Keith Biondo
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Help From Your Warehouse

Your warehouse and fulfillment operations—and the people, partners, and processes that make them run—have just gotten monumentally more important, because a series of convergent events are raising national supply chain costs at every touch. Let’s unpack the why. In the industrial and manufacturing sectors, added costs on materials and products impacted by ongoing trade friction […]

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Automating AP Processes Takes the Bottleneck out of Manufacturing Supply Chains

The manufacturing industry has its roots intertwined with one of the biggest advances in the history of modern civilization – the Industrial Revolution. The manufacturing process was dramatically transformed, seemingly overnight, from a labor intensive, manual process to one that utilized machines in order to exponentially increase the production of goods. More recently, the manufacturing […]

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Industry 4.0 and the Agile Supply Chain: Materials Inventory Meets AI

Materials inventory is no small matter for manufacturing companies. Duplicate parts in your storeroom place a needless burden on your books, while depleted or inaccurate inventories threaten your supply chain with unexpected downtime when equipment fails. To top things off, managing inventory can become a headache for employees tasked with harmonizing or syncing data from […]

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What, Me Worry?

Manufacturing professionals are among the most aware of industry change due to automation, finds The State of Intelligent Process Automation from Nintex. The survey of manufacturing workers finds that 75 percent don’t harbor concern for job security amid the rise of new technologies. In fact, 33 percent are worried these tools will make their jobs […]

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Manufacturers Laser-Focused on Technology
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Manufacturers Laser-Focused on Technology

Digital transformation is truly underway in manufacturing. While digital technologies such as cloud, mobile, big data and analytics, and Internet of Things have been industry drivers for years, manufacturers now have high expectations for the business value of technologies—edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), collaborative robots (cobots), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR)—that are […]

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Technology Powers U.S. Manufacturing Renaissance
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Technology Powers U.S. Manufacturing Renaissance

The impact of powerful forces such as digital transformation, Industry 4.0, the current regulatory climate, and automation on U.S. manufacturers is the focus of a new research report from ECi Software Solutions. The findings indicate the role technology is playing in the U.S. manufacturing resurgence, with 89 percent of respondents confirming they had increased technology […]

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Factory Robots: Better Safe Than Sorry

In the new gig economy, workers are individual contractors—they are mobile, can work from any place, and save their companies time and resources. A Massachusetts company believes lidar technology could be the key to developing a safer factory robot—and to enabling those robots to take on many of the remaining tasks still completed by human […]

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Supply Chain Scorecards: A Tool for the Times

Advanced technologies like blockchain and AI have captured widespread interest with the benefits they promise to bring to logistics operations. But, for all the promise these appear to hold, there are proven enhancement-focused tools already available – in particular, scorecards – that supply chain managers should take full advantage right now to ensure optimized performance […]

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Manufacturing Reaches Pre-Recession Levels

The U.S. manufacturing sector will regain all of the output lost since June 2009 by April 2019, indicates a recent report from the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI). A global economic rebound, the passage of U.S. tax reform legislation, and the depreciation of the U.S. dollar are the chief components MAPI identifies as […]

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Simplifying Supply Chain Complexities

Manufacturing has never been more global, productive, profitable, or vulnerable. Despite tremendous advances in breaking down global barriers and adding efficiency to the supply chain, there are still challenges to move products quickly, safely, and seamlessly. To appreciate the complexity of today’s global supply chain, consider Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner passenger jet. Each jet is comprised […]

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