As this blog has noted, the U.S. manufacturing industry is on a steady road to recovery after some lean years. Between 1998 and 2008, the United States lost 51,000 manufacturing plants and 6 million jobs to offshoring, especially to China. But since 2010 more than 200 companies have returned Stateside, including both American companies like Caterpillar Inc. and General Electric and foreign corporations like Siemens and Toyota. This "re-shoring" process has contributed to four straight years of manufacturing job growth, the longest such stretch in a quarter of a century.

Among the factors that are convincing companies to return to the U.S. are rising wages in China and the decreasing price of natural gas in America, but a Manufacturing.net article suggests another reason: the growing adoption of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, which make it much easier for manufacturers to coordinate operations across different departments and even on different continents.

And cloud ERP solutions are not just for large multinational enterprises. Any manufacturer can benefit from allowing salespeople and other remote workers to access its ERP system from the field. A good ERP platform unifies every step of a company's processes to optimize interdepartmental collaboration, and cloud deployment extends that benefit to employees who are away from headquarters, providing them with all the information they need to carry out their jobs in the field.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is one of the most popular business management software solutions for small and medium-sized companies. It is ideal for manufacturers because it tracks inventory, job costs and scheduling, and it's the perfect solution for SMBs because it can be adapted to businesses' specific needs and upgraded as they grow.