Visitors to this year’s MACH exhibition moved one step closer to the factory of the future as NexSys officially unveiled its complete solutions for manufacturing automation for the first time ever.
Not only did the integration specialist use the occasion to educate manufacturers on ways they can improve efficiencies with the latest version of the SYSPRO Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, but the company also used the occasion to unveil its newly refreshed Orchard Warehouse Management application, its advanced Equator HR software and the company’s very own and unique systems integration tool DataSwitch.
Alongside these, the business brought together products from its extensive network of manufacturing industry partners including document management software, barcode and labelling applications and Customer Relationship Management solutions and CAD integration tools. The result is a complete suite of integrated applications that help manufacturing businesses get one step closer to Industry 4.0, and the automated, interconnected factory of the future.
According to NexSys’s Managing Director Cathie Hall, an intelligent factory is one that has automated processes for increased efficiency, and one which is using traditional technologies such as ERP in a completely new way.
Cathie Hall commented: “ERP systems are no longer the transactional data black holes that they used to be. Intelligent factories are using them as the focal points of automation to store, analyse and utilise data to make further efficiencies across the shop floor. Systems such as SYSPRO have kept pace with the developing trends in SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) and can enable cloud based analytical data being to be pushed up into the cloud, analysed and pushed back through the ERP system to view business critical data on simple dashboards, on mobile devices and through social frameworks.”
NexSys’s service offering was unified for MACH 2016 at a time when Barclays has revealed that 58% of UK manufacturing businesses have recently invested in some form of automation, compared to 66% in Germany; the nation that is spearheading the fourth industrial revolution. Worryingly, 25% of UK manufacturing businesses have not considered investing in automation, versus 21% of German manufacturers.
Cathie Hall continued: “The future factory is the automated factory and this means channelling all business critical data through one central system. At NexSys, we have developed an extensive range of software applications which can fully integrate with SYSPRO to provide busy manufacturing managers and CIOs with real time, instant and accurate data relating to business performance, so they can make agile and effective decisions more quickly. That’s how the UK manufacturing industry will remain globally competitive as it embraces Industry 4.0.”