Creating Innovation Breakthroughs in Industrial Equipment / Discrete Manufacturing

Competition from low-wage companies, the meteoric rise of e-commerce, evolving supply chain practices, and the mandate to produce a rapid return on investment (ROI) at any cost are all exerting severe pressures on industrial equipment manufacturers. Daily, they confront challenges related to product quality, business integration, on-time delivery, evolving supply chain initiatives, and improved customer service. The competition for each customer is intense—a fact not lost upon buyers, who are demanding that manufacturers produce faster and cheaper goods without sacrificing product excellence. In a fever to retain market share, many manufacturers rushed to implement shop floor improvements. However, by focusing on shop floor improvements alone, companies overlooked the substantial benefits of streamlining all company processes, from concurrent engineering to customer service, sales, marketing, and accounting. In reality, shop floor operations make up a relatively small portion of a company’s overall costs. This white paper outlines some of the ways discrete manufacturers can improve processes across their company and successfully reposition themselves as solution providers. Software solutions can help by automating processes and making it easy to share information. This paper will also address specific ways that Microsoft Dynamics® AX, the robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Microsoft, can help industrial equipment manufacturing companies, and other discrete manufacturers, operate competitively. Sold and implemented only by authorized partners like Fullscope, Microsoft Dynamics AX is taking the ERP world by storm with its familiar interface and easy to use/easy to integrate capabilities.