Manufacturing Data Analytics in 2026: A US Plant Manager’s Practical Guide Manufacturing data analytics is a category that has suffered from over-promising for two decades. Every consulting firm has predicted transformative returns from “industrial big...
Manufacturing KPI Dashboards: What to Measure and How to Display It Manufacturing KPI dashboards are simultaneously one of the most-deployed and least-useful tools in US manufacturing. Nearly every plant has dashboards somewhere — on shop-floor displays, in management...
OEE in Manufacturing: The Complete 2026 Guide for US Plant Managers Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is the single most important operational metric in discrete and process manufacturing. It measures what percentage of scheduled production time is actually...
Automation for Manufacturing: A US Buyer’s Guide for 2026 The US manufacturing automation market in 2026 is a $30+ billion annual spend category fragmented across hundreds of vendors. For a US plant manager evaluating where to invest, the difficulty is not...
Manufacturing Automation for US Plants: 2026 Strategy Guide Manufacturing automation in 2026 means something different than it meant in 2006. Twenty years ago, automation was primarily about hardware: industrial robots, PLCs, conveyor systems, automated storage. In...
Manufacturing AI in 2026: A Practical Guide for US Plant Managers If you are a US plant manager, you have been pitched AI solutions dozens of times in the last three years. Every industrial software vendor has rebranded some portion of their product as AI-powered;...
Production Scheduling Software for US Manufacturing: 2026 Selection Guide Production scheduling is where the rubber meets the road in manufacturing. ERP generates high-level production requirements; the production scheduling system translates those requirements into...
ERP for Manufacturing: What US Plant Managers Need to Know in 2026 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is the transactional spine of any US manufacturing operation. It manages orders from customers, procurement from suppliers, financial accounting, HR, and —...
Manufacturing Execution System (MES) Software: The 2026 US Buyer’s Guide Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software is one of the highest-stakes software decisions a US manufacturing company makes. Enterprise MES deployments typically run 18 to 36 months,...
The Principles of Lean Manufacturing and How to Deploy Them in a US Plant Lean Manufacturing is defined by five principles, first articulated by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their 1996 book Lean Thinking: Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull, and Perfection. Thirty...
