Avoiding 4 Common Digital Transformation Obstacles

While the fourth industrial revolution began an entire decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of the virus has only accelerated the changes this revolution has been promising. Manufacturers across the globe have been forced to find ways to maintain productivity in the face of lockdown…


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What is the “Yatai” Flexible Manufacturing System?

The age of manufacturing’s status quo has long since ended. A weakening labor pool (and increasingly more difficult bar of entry set the stage for that end) and 2020 look like the final nails in that coffin. Now the buzzwords like resiliency, visibility, and smart all describe one core principle of…


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A Practical Approach to Supply Chain Risk Management

2020 has passed and, to be honest, the entire year was essentially one big supply chain disruption. Everything that could have gone wrong, and many things that we didn’t even know could go wrong, did. Fortunately all these trials and tribulations, for all the chaos they caused, instilled in many…


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How to Build a Waste Heat Recovery System Tailored to Your Business

When one thinks of wasted resources, the mind tends to picture certain things: sheet metal, wood, food stuffs, etc. We tend to pigeon hole ourselves into very physical representations of “waste” and focus on mitigating lost profit through eliminating these sources of physical waste. And while this…


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The Benefits of Mixed Reality in Manufacturing Explained

An employee on the factory line approaches a machine they’ve never in their life operated. Staring at the mass of unfamiliar iron and circuitry, they stand dumbfounded for a moment before a set of instructions materializes in front of them dictating where the controls are located. Happy to have…


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How Manufacturers Can Switch Gears for Autonomous Vehicle Technology

Ever looking towards the future, people are constantly carrying a romanticized view of the kinds of technologies that will be available in the future – hoverboards, holograms, robotics, the list goes on and on. And while some of these advancements we dream of are a long time coming or are…


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Why and How to Use Big Data in Manufacturing

With COVID, labor shortages, and compromised supply chains in full swing, the average manufacturer finds themselves grappling with one of two paths to follow. They can either A: pare back and attempt to save money – adopting a more lean manufacturing approach that’s optimized to only deliver…


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How Industry 4.0 Will Address the Manufacturing Talent Shortage

There’s been a rather peculiar, seemingly contradictory, trend coming out of the manufacturing industry the last few months. According to a report by the Institute for Supply Chain Management, manufacturing activity rose up to 56% in August, jumping up nearly 2% from numbers recorded in July. Even…


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Defining Lean Manufacturing, Its Core Principles, and Recommended Tools

Manufacturing has always been infatuated with creating as much as it can with as little as possible. The less resources, time, and confusing processes involved in creating a product, the less money wasted and the more optimized the operation. And while this is surely true in many regards,…


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What is OT Security? IT vs OT Security Best Practices

It’s rather unfortunate but cybercriminal activities tend to rise in times of increased stress and anxiety. 2020 has proven to show no shortages of both stress and anxiety and the proportional rise in cybersecurity attacks across all industries tend to prove this trend. Many times, these…


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