Technology has driven fundamental changes in the way industrial and manufacturing companies manage their businesses. With the addition of sophisticated solutions, like warehouse management and ERP systems, as well as advanced data capture and wireless networking tools, companies are squeezing more efficiency out of their operations every day.

In most cases though, companies have built silos of applications defined by departments or processes (e.g. WMS to manage the warehouse). These solutions deliver significant improvements for the specific areas they're designed to manage, but do nothing to unite the entire supply chain. It's rare for companies to have reached that level of automation or, in some cases, even understand the value of doing so. But the rapidly changing marketplace is creating a greater demand for manufacturers to be more agile and flexible in order to meet their needs, and that, in turn, is placing more pressure on managing supply chains.

It's not uncommon for companies to gain 20 percent more productivity in areas they've automated. Now imagine those same gains across every function.

That's what total automation can do for an industrial/manufacturing enterprise. It can dramatically improve operations by providing real-time data to all the interdependent parts of the supply chain.