Companies have increasingly been adopting newer technologies in recent months to get a jump start after the Covid-19 slump. With customer demand being so volatile in many industries, it has often been a task for 3PL and 4PL companies to adjust their business processes to combat these disruptions. Business closures, …
Amazon’s logistics footprint grew a meteoric 50% during 2020, all with a pandemic going on. What is the secret to Amazon’s successful growth this past year? 1 word: Automation. People sometimes associate automation with downsizing or a way to cut costs, but Amazon took a different approach and made it …
Innovation can be tough task for smaller businesses looking to get a competitive advantage. In the US small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are generally companies with less than 500 employees, but based on the industry, ownership structure, and revenue, that number can be as high as 1,500 employees. PricewaterhouseCoopers says …
Robots and robotic processes are portrayed in many Hollywood blockbusters as a part of the science fiction world, but now they are becoming a crucial component of the manufacturing and logistics industries. Deloitte says these autonomous robots can range anywhere “from robotic process automation to flying vehicles with powerful image …
In this time of volatile markets, supply chains are struggling to find the right balance between keeping lean manufacturing practices with just-in-time (JIT) inventory strategies and buffered inventory levels with plenty of safety stock. According to Gartner VP of Supply Chain Research and Advisory Geraint John on Supply Chain Dive, …
Unexpected weather events can wreak havoc on domestic freight transportation and the 4 ‘ways’: roadways, railways, runways, and waterways. Trucking (on roadways) is the largest (70% of the manufacturing and warehousing industries) and often the hardest hit industry for that reason during these big storms. The Superstorm in 1993, Hurricane …
Manufacturing and logistics companies have vast amounts of big data that is often underutilized in their operational decision making. This Dark Data, as Gartner defines it, is “the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes (for example, analytics, …
According to The Economist, when the swine-flu pandemic of 2009 happened “companies ramped up production…only to be driven to the verge of bankruptcy when demand fell back to normal”. Building resilience in your company to plan for changes is vital to staying competitive year after year. But how do you …
StrataFlows Featured as an Expert Columnist in Supply & Drive Chain Executive Material Flow Analysis (MFA), or Process Flow Analysis (PFA), is fundamental to any material handling strategy. MFA aims to map, inspect, and evaluate all flow of materials from suppliers, to storage locations, and finally to the point of …
Resiliency has been the overwhelming theme in the past year as companies have grappled with changes in the supply chain due to Covid-19. As the ProMatDX approaches in April, manufacturers are reminded of software solutions that give them more visibility in their supply chain as they recover and prepare for …
ProMat Digital Experience (DX) 2021, presented by MHI, is quickly approaching. This show connects manufacturers and supply chain professionals with access to the solutions they need now to modernize and improve the resiliency and agility of their operations. This year, like most other tradeshows, ProMat will be taking place virtually. …
The Toyota Production System adopted a methodology in 1930 making production processes highly efficient. In recent years this methodology has been lauded for the successes of Toyota and has been defined and named Lean Manufacturing. According to Kettering Global, these “lean techniques have been adopted by more than 72 percent of machine shops across the country”. There are five core principles of lean …
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, has been a decade in the making. It is the converging of IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) and is driving the transformation of connectivity, intelligence, and flexible automation in the manufacturing industry. Industry 4.0 is a sort of technology toolbox with the goal of digitizing data, in real time, …
The manufacturing industry is changing, and many organizations are utilizing Robotic Process Automation to do business these days. Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is a crucial component of the fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 is the shift in manufacturing that is increasingly using digital solutions to solve physical problems. An RPA is an …
The importance of Supply Chain Management has been crucial these past 9 months. Covid-19 has challenged companies’ abilities to adapt quickly in a rapidly changing global supply chain. In the last decade companies have increasingly streamlined their supply chains, but with the uncertainty of Coronavirus, agility has become a big focus in materials management as well as supply chain management. These past few months …
Supply chain professionals at every stage of their career know there is increasing risk in our global supply chain – they see it, and at times, they really feel it. It may not have been as easy to quantify, though as it is now, thanks to the McKinsey Global Institute …
Gartner, the leading research and advisory company, put together a list of recommendations outlining actions technology driven organizations should take in response to both short- and long-term effects of the Covid crisis. Not only has Covid put major stress on individuals and businesses in the present-day, but we will unfortunately …
Paper. Email. Spreadsheets. Compared to the automated, fast-paced environment of manufacturing, these tools are antiquated, cumbersome, and slow. Yet supply chain managers rely on paper, emails, and spreadsheets every day for critical functions including material handling. This often leads to costly production outages due to material flow or other avoidable …
As organizations reopen in-person services, they need to keep employees and customers safe. StrataFlows’ COVID-19 employee self-assessment module helps minimize the risk of exposure to someone infectious with COVID-19 as organizations provide important in-person services. Employees can use StrataFlows’ COVID-19 self-assessment survey module before reporting to work each day. You can …
7 steps to building more resilient material flow processes Even “last mile” material flow disruptions, close to the Point of Use (POU) in the supply chain, quickly result in significant delays and unnecessary financial cost when it brings production to a halt. Mitigate material flow exceptions using the following recommendations: …
The core principles of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) were first constructed by Joseph Orlicky in 1964. That same year, Black & Decker served as the pioneer in employing this netting algorithm. By 1981, the number of organizations using MRP quickly grew to over 7,000! To this day, this number continues …
Material Flow Analysis (MFA), or Process Flow Analysis, is a fundamental aspect for planning out material process steps. Within the framework of material handling, MFA has the goal of mapping, inspecting and evaluating all flows within an organization. Its focus is to gain a statistical benchmark for a supply chain. For instance, …
Material Handling is one of the most important components in manufacturing. What is it, you may ask? In simple terms, it is defined as moving materials. In manufacturing, the production system set-up is crucial. A plant’s efficiency, productivity, and profitability is dependent on successful material flow. Without it, production would grind …
The College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE) of the Material Handling Institute, Inc., has adapted the 10 principles of material handling. The experience of generations of material handling engineers has been summarized here for new and seasoned practitioners. Each of these principles are discussed in the following sections. …
There’s never a good time for an event like the COVID-19 outbreak, but humbly we should all appreciate that it happened after cloud-delivered software solutions became a thing. During these times, the usual list of advantages of cloud-hosted solutions aren’t worth touting, the key advantage to focus on in these …
