Podcast: Whose Manufacturing News Do You Believe?
A new podcast was released to your favorite podcast catcher. I review a recent New York Times opinion piece and responses. Why don't we all take the initiative to evangelize our profession?
Public Perceptions of Manufacturing
Experts using scare tactics in order to drive page views and notoriety get daily publicity talking about “robots” taking manufacturing jobs away from people. They never even dig deeply enough even to find the broader “automation” that they really mean. I’ve written a...
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Advances
A couple of interesting items came my way regarding autonomous vehicle technology. Every year sees better applications and more powerful tech. Then note in the releases X-as-a-Service applications. This idea just keeps expanding into more useful areas. AI-capable...
The Future of Work
Mechanization, automation, and eventually digitalization have improved the labor experience of humans for millennia. The first voices raising an alarm about the future was work was the rebellion against centralizing production--moving it from the craftsman's shed or...
Long Delayed Beckhoff Automation News from SPS
I’m finally catching up on news from past trips. I stopped by the Beckhoff Automation booth at SPS in Nuremberg last November and chatted for about an hour over all the displays. Here is a sampling. TwinSAFE: modular, scalable and distributed safety applications The...
Roll Your Own SCADA or Control Device?
One of the most popular posts on my Website every month for years (written in January 2016) is about Raspberry Pi and Linux for HMI/SCADA. One of my important news sources is The Information. It is a subscription-based news source—mostly technology news. I saw this...
CPQ Stands At Center of Industry Digitalization
The point of manufacturing is to design and make a product then deliver the right product to the customer. Sometimes we just churn out a large quantity and hope they will sell. Sometimes we configure to order or “mass customize” products. For example, I once had a job...
True Role of Automation and Jobs
When I read something in major mainstream media about manufacturing, production, automation, robots, or jobs, I’m prepared to cringe. Often the author has a journalism or economics degree who never worked inside a plant. Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association...
Value Investing and Company Analysis
I have never been a fan-boy of Jack Welch. And the more we learn in retrospect, we see why he is not necessarily a genius to emulate. As a friend used to say, “You got your smoke; you got your mirrors.” It was growth by acquisition and using deft accounting. Vitaliy...
The Year of IT and OT
We should be so beyond talk of The IT/OT convergence. This has not been a technology issue for years. If anything it is an organization and personal issue. Executives continue to view their organizations as constructed of a variety of separate domains. This is often...
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