Author Archives: Charing Kam

When it comes to calculating profit margins in manufacturing sales, sales teams can only project a limited amount, especially with the time they are provided to create a quote. Yet, quoting has to be quick and accurate. This leads to a conundrum that can plague many manufacturers: how can you price your products or manufacturing services and take into consideration all the different factors, requirements, and profit margins that the business needs, while being fast and accurate?

Within the framework of manufacturing sales is a wide variety of sales processes, needs, and challenges. A contract manufacturer will have unique requirements when trying to close a sale that would differ greatly from a precision engineering company. Sales cycles can be long and drawn-out, or they can be a straightforward upsell opportunity which requires significantly less resources to craft.

July has been an interesting month for Industry 4.0, with trade news causing manufacturers worldwide to start paying attention to new ways to manage their supply chain. From Indonesia to India, we’ve seen news that have discussed manufacturing challenges and investment in close detail. Read our top three, below:  

As part of an ongoing series of Industry 4.0 articles to help manufacturers embrace the fourth Industrial Revolution, we will be going through some concepts, theories, and practical examples. Our first article was about Industry 4.0 success stories. To keep up with the series, sign up for our newsletter.

As part of an ongoing series of Industry 4.0 articles to help manufacturers embrace the fourth Industrial Revolution, we will be going through some concepts, theories, and practical examples. Our first article was about Industry 4.0 success stories, and the second was about Equipment-as-a-Service. To keep up with the series, sign up for our newsletter.

This month was a busy one for us here at In Mind Cloud, with our participation in SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, the SAP Global Partner Summit, the 18^th Die & Mould 2018, Automatica 2018, and the 10th APEC SMETC 2018. 

As part of an ongoing series of Industry 4.0 articles to help manufacturers embrace the fourth Industrial Revolution, we will be going through some concepts, theories, and practical examples. Our first article was about Industry 4.0 success stories. To keep up with the series, sign up for our newsletter.

In the last 30 years, technology has brought many changes to the factory floor. From the need to expand factory sizes due to on-premise machines that ran programs at a snail’s pace, to the current ability for Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions to run the factory, we can’t deny the improvements that technological advancements have brought in the realms of efficiency and productivity.

We have to be honest: the month of May passed by in a flash. With the annual SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference happening in Orlando, Florida in a week, we’ve been too preoccupied preparing for our different sessions: from our customers, Netafim and Mindray, talking about digitalized sales and business innovation, to our CEO, who will be discussing our own solutions offered on the SAP App Center during the partner summit.

This is the first in a series of Industry 4.0 posts that aim to help manufacturers take advantage of the power of innovations in manufacturing. To receive the next post in the series, sign up for our newsletter. 

In the world of manufacturing, it can be tough to get started on digitalisation due to legacy systems, skill gaps, and other complexities. Even as data becomes an important part of decision making in the future, only about half of industrial manufacturers are actively focusing on data today, per a PwC study. This means that there are plenty of bumps in the road for manufacturers who are looking at Industry 4.0 solutions, but have not been able to start on their digitalisation journey.

To provide some help, we have collated 3 spectacular success stories that every manufacturer should read:

In the world of smart factories, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Industry 4.0, it can quickly be confusing to see the difference between advances in technology. Even in the world of machine maintenance, we’ve seen robots, machine learning, and other technologies and service models appear in the span of the last few decades.

It is hence important for us to differentiate between all the terms floating around in the realm of maintenance, to ensure that manufacturers stay on the same page as technology providers. After all, if you shortened it, the abbreviation ‘PM’ could now refer to Preventive Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance, or Prescriptive Maintenance! It’s time to break down the differences between the three. 

There are many benefits to having multiple sites and sales regions: for enterprise manufacturing businesses, local sales offices and production sites make for lower costs and quicker time-to-quote.

However, the process of setting up sales offices and production sites in different countries and regions tends to create silo-ed factories and offices: most of them don’t find a need to be connected to other sites on a day to day basis, so they aren’t. Even when sites are in the same region, they may not be aware of each site’s activities, from productivity levels to sales activities.

Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA), or Life-Cycle Costing (LCC), is a common concept in the world of procurement and manufacturing: It refers to the need to analyse all ‘costs of production, installation, usage and disposal, aiming at the minimum of the total cost’, as per a 1998 research paper, ‘Product Life Cycle Costing Applied to Manufacturing Systems’.

Instead of focusing on the cheapest cost price, LCC looks at a material’s entire life cycle (hence the term), and the need to include installation, operational, maintenance, and end-of-life costs to the overall buying cost of a material.