Today’s market conditions require manufacturers to be more agile and innovative than ever before while relying less on skilled workers who are in short supply.

However, the legacy systems that manufacturers have long relied on to manage their operations, such as MES and ERP, are ill-equipped to meet their needs due to bloated and unspecialized capabilities, rigid architectures that stifle innovation, and an over-reliance on manual data entry and processes.

In this report, we outline how manufacturers can take advantage of the most valuable resource at their disposal, machine data, to address their current systems’ shortcomings while setting them on a path to a long-term strategy that capitalizes on best-of-breed technologies.

This modern approach to manufacturing software, which we refer to as “the connected factory,” looks at the many functions and systems within an operation as part of an ecosystem of solutions rooted in connectivity that begins at the machine level.