Hoffmaster, a leading manufacturer of disposable tabletop paper products, has gone live with Crossroads MES at their Oshkosh, WI plant. This is the 3^rd Hoffmaster plant that has gone live with the Crossroads MES solution, and implementation of 80 more machines is planned at this facility for later this year. Engineering drawings and other production-related documents are now immediately available at each workstation running MES, thereby increasing efficiency and accuracy in their operations.

Efficiency is something we all strive for in our personal lives and at work. How can manufacturers increase their efficiency? Take a hard look at the 4 key areas:

1. Planning
2. Bill of Material and Job Accuracy
3. Inventory Planning
4. Real Time Reporting / Processing 

Need help figuring out how to become more efficient in each of these areas? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Efficiency is something we all strive for in our personal lives and at work. How can manufacturers increase their efficiency? Take a hard look at the 4 key areas:

1. Planning
2. Bill of Material and Job Accuracy
3. Inventory Planning
4. Real Time Reporting / Processing 

Need help figuring out how to become more efficient in each of these areas? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Exit Points is a new feature in Infor LX Version 8 that allows users to customize, without changing the original LX source code. Exit points provide a way for you to call an external program and pass a set of parameters to implement any needed custom logic. By using Exit Points, LX customers are able to modify the software, and still take advantage of new releases from Infor. Exit points are available in many LX programs. A complete list is available on the Infor support website.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.

1. Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. 
2. Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best. 
3. Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.

Poor performance indicators make for poor outcomes.

Companies today continue to tolerate and accept how labor and production information is recorded, and the reliability on that information is questionable. In addition to collecting labor and production information, there are many other pieces of information manually recorded from the shop floor.

A critical element of information for productivity throughput would be to examine how much time the work center or machine was actually up and running. Downtime is another critical element of data that is usually manually recorded along with a reason identifying what caused production to stop. If this information is not provided on a timely and accurate basis, then what good is it anyway? Forms are filled out, data may or may not be keyed to a spreadsheet, the forms are sorted and filed, but is anybody really looking at the information that was recorded? Think about the amount of time it takes to manage the manual collection of information from your shop floor. 

What would real time access to data mean to your organization?
The benefits:

1. Real Time Production Visibility
2. Reduced Paperwork Load
3. Downtime and Scrap Visibility
4. WIP Inventory Visibility
5. Improve Efficiency, Capacity Utilization

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Poor performance indicators make for poor outcomes.

Companies today continue to tolerate and accept how labor and production information is recorded, and the reliability on that information is questionable. In addition to collecting labor and production information, there are many other pieces of information manually recorded from the shop floor.

A critical element of information for productivity throughput would be to examine how much time the work center or machine was actually up and running. Downtime is another critical element of data that is usually manually recorded along with a reason identifying what caused production to stop. If this information is not provided on a timely and accurate basis, then what good is it anyway? Forms are filled out, data may or may not be keyed to a spreadsheet, the forms are sorted and filed, but is anybody really looking at the information that was recorded? Think about the amount of time it takes to manage the manual collection of information from your shop floor. 

What would real time access to data mean to your organization?
The benefits:

1. Real Time Production Visibility
2. Reduced Paperwork Load
3. Downtime and Scrap Visibility
4. WIP Inventory Visibility
5. Improve Efficiency, Capacity Utilization

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Happy New Year! January is always a great time to reflect on the prior year – what went well, and what didn’t. It is also the obvious time to plan for the coming year – what do I want to accomplish and how can I best achieve my goals?

As the saying goes, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”, so if you haven’t already, it is time to start putting processes, procedures and programs in place within your company to measure how well each department is doing against their objectives. Start to analyze your numbers and publish them internally. Where are you at currently? Where do you want to be? Seeing both sets of numbers pushes employees to hit those targets. Do this now, and you’ll be seeing positive results before you know it!  

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!