Following ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky’s ideology of “skating to where the puck is going to be,” is Greg Lake, president of The Lake Companies and an accomplished entrepreneur in the manufacturing industry, seeking to uncover and solve problems encountered on the shop floor. Leveraging his 40 years of experience in application development and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, Lake started his company to provide industrial organizations and manufacturers with a suite of business-ready solutions to streamline workflows and maximize revenues.“Since the inception of The Lake Companies in 1983, we have observed many voids in the marketplace, where supervisors lacked effective manufacturing execution software and business intelligence (BI) to optimize the efficiency of the shop floors,” recalls Lake. Following which, the company started collaborating with Infor, an enterprise software company, as its channel partner to deliver the CloudSuite Industrial (Syteline ERP) solution. Fast forward to 1995, when business intelligence (BI) was still a new concept, organizations made use of ERP reporting to help manage machines, devices, and other supply chain and back-office operations. At this juncture Lake and his firm saw the limitations of reporting and recognized the extensive applications of BI in the realm of industrial ERP.

The Lake Companies, with a focus to deliver rich, detailed, and easy-to-integrate solutions, supports a shop floor supervisor with four distinct applications: Shop-Trak, Doc-Trak, Fact-Trak, and Beacon-Trak. “Built to seamlessly integrate with CloudSuite Industrial (Syteline ERP), our software provides users with full control and visibility of all operations on the shop floor,” expresses Lake. These applications, while possessing impressive standalone capabilities, transform shop floor management for all users in the organization.

Built to seamlessly integrate with Syteline ERP, our software provides users with full control and visibility of all operations on the shop floor

Shop-Trak focuses on production and manufacturing execution as a combination of time and attendance, manufacturing labor collection, manufacturing material collection, machine costing, and performance information. Collectively, it serves as a one-stop solution, and when Shop-Trak integrates with Doc-Trak, a shop floor supervisor gains the ability to automate documentation processes that span across an organization’s supply chain. On the other hand, the BI expertise of The Lake Companies shines via the Fact-Trak application, where users can conduct streamlined, comprehensive data analysis from their ERP database in near real-time and produce detailed reports expeditiously. With the help of a simple spreadsheet format, shop floor supervisors and other authorized personnel can utilize role-based BI on an interactive dashboard with a UI that promises seamless user experience (UX).

“To help manufacturers manage production and other functions in their sphere of influence, we developed a solution that walks along with them on the shop floor,” explains a passionate Lake. And, to help reach that benchmark, The Lake Companies developed Beacon- Trak: a manufacturing operations management application. The patent-pending product enables shop floor supervisors to gather relevant, proximity-based information as and when they walk past or near specific machines and other production systems. Beacon-Trak brings clarity and confidence to users, allowing them to study data better and maintain a fully functional manufacturing supply chain. “All of our applications are aimed at improving workflows and reducing expenses. We ensure quick integrations to avoid downtime and leverage industry-standard software like Microsoft Power BI and Excel’s pivot tables to give clients a seamless UX,” states Lake.

With ‘simple, elegant, and powerful’ as its motto, The Lake Companies continues to be a pioneer in the field of manufacturing ERP. The company, along with a team of seasoned professionals, seeks to leverage the latest technologies and provide organizations with the best-in-class software applications to improve shop floor experiences for all parties involved.