Suggested Reading

  • Campbell Soup’s Data Acquisition Journey 5/20/13Tom Braydich, Campbell’s director of controls and maintenance systems engineering, doesn’t want to pound his PLCs full of code to enjoy the benefits of the automated data collection. So he found another way, and told attendees at The Automation Conference about it. Read Full Article Source: Reynolds Pat, automationworld.com, 15 May 2013
  • Report: U.S. manufacturing costs are now equal to Mexico and will be equal to China by 2015 5/13/13In another sign that America is becoming more competitive in manufacturing, the U.S. is now equal to Mexico in “attractiveness” as a source for manufacturing operations and is on track to achieve cost parity with manufactured imports from China by 2015. Read Full Article Source: SCMR Staff, scmr.com, 29 April 2013
  • Corporate America’s Most Insufferable Expressions 4/03/13In honor of the NCAA basketball tournament—and in disdain for all business jargon, buzzwords, clichés, euphemisms and grammatical catastrophes—Forbes recently hosted its second-annual Jargon Madness competition. Read Full Article Source: Nelson, Brett, Forbes.com, 3 April 2013
  • March Madness Graduation Rates; How does your team rank academically? 3/18/13The next few weeks will be dedicated to the American pastime of picking a bracket, watching hours-upon-hours of college basketball and then, perhaps, cashing in on bets placed on the abilities of high-salaried coaches and unsalaried student athletes. Here’s something to ponder: How many of those players will leave the court with a college degree? Read Full ...
  • Protect your time – Structure your day to maximize results 2/28/13We all have the same amount of “time dollars” each day, and how we choose to spend those time dollars will amount to how our lives are organized and if we are at peace with that picture… Read Full Article Source: Jo Gorissen, BizTimes.com, 18 February 2013  
  • Increasing Productivity With Workflow 2/21/13Manufacturing is evolving faster than ever. To remain competitive and profitable, companies need to be faster and more nimble– improving the speed of their business and plant operations improves their ability to respond to market changes Read Full Article Source: Tom Troy, Manufacturing Business Technology, 19 December 2012  
  • The Insourcing Boom 1/22/13After years of offshore production, General Electric is moving much of its far-flung appliance-manufacturing operations back home. It is not alone. An exploration of the startling, sustainable, just-getting-started return of industry to the United States. Read Full Article Source: Charles Fishman, The Atlantic, December 2012  
  • Social Media Can Play a Role in Business Process Management 1/08/13Social media offers us a chance to improve the communications supporting process improvement. Leading organizations are already using the power of social media to shape their business process management (BPM) agendas. Read Full Article Source: Mark Pearson, Harvard Business Review, 7 January 2013  
  • How The Fiscal Cliff Will Impact U.S. Industry 11/26/12How much damage will going over the fiscal cliff inflict on the U.S. Economy? The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) took up the subject in their new report, Fiscal Shock: America’s Economic Crisis. The verdict: Read Full Article Source: Kyle Spencer, Seeking Alpha, 13 November 2012  
  • 10 Incredibly Simple Things You Can Do To Protect Your Privacy 11/15/12Choosing not to password protect your devices is the digital equivalent of leaving your home or car unlocked. If you’re lucky, no one will take advantage of the access. Read Full Article Source: Forbes.com, 2012.  
  • Would You Recommend Your Job to Your Children? 11/12/1267% of people in agriculture say they’d recommend their jobs to their offspring. The next highest are… Read Full Article Source: Harvard Business Review (from Salary.com), 27 October 2012.  
  • Vote Today: National Association of Manufacturer’s Voter Guide 11/05/12Which of YOUR candidates support manufacturing? Find of with our voter guide. Read Full Article Source: National Association of Manufacturers, 2012  
  • SCADA System Hack Forces Control Engineers to Reevaluate Network Security 10/22/12You might remember that a water plant SCADA system apparently was hacked, and a pump failed. These two unrelated events were forcibly related. One was because of the other. This was shown to be untrue, but the psychological effects of such behavior linger in the depths of us control guys. Read Full Article Source: Control Design.com, Jeremy ...
  • Ten Reasons People Resist Change 10/01/12The best tool for leaders of change is to understand the predictable, universal sources of resistance in each situation and then strategize around them. Here are the ten I’ve found to be the most common: Read Full Article Source: Harvard Business Review, Rosabeth Moss Kanter,  September 25, 2012  
  • Top 5 Tips: How to Get the Most Out of Attending a User Group Meeting 9/17/12We all go to user group meetings—in fact, it’s a staple in our industry. Whether it’s for our own company, or you are attending a partner’s, or technology provider’s, there is a vast opportunity to learn, improve, and accelerate your network development.  Here are some tips I’ve gathered for helping you to optimize your time: Read Full ...
  • The 15 College Majors With The Highest Pay 8/28/12College has never been more expensive, so what should someone study so the student has a better chance at a high salary once graduation comes? Read Full Article Source: The Huffington Post, Tyler Kingkade, August 24, 2012  
  • Be More Productive. Take Time Off. 8/20/12Change is important. When we were growing up, we got summers off from school. Summer vacation was change. It was something to look forward to. A few months of something different really meant a lot. Read Full Article Source: New York Times, Jason Fried, August 18, 2012  
  • The Facts About Modern Manufacturing 8/13/12With campaign season in full swing, politicians on both sides of the aisle are paying lip service to manufacturing. Unfortunately, they don’t always support goals and policies that will actually encourage manufacturers to invest in America. Read Full Article Source:  MAPI.net, Stephen V. Gold,  August 7, 2012  
  • Why We Need to Rebuild the U.S. Manufacturing Sector 8/06/12The 2012 elections are taking shape as a referendum on the U.S. economy. Which is a very good thing. We’re a decade overdue for a frank national conversation about American innovation in the twenty-first century. Read Full Article Source: Forbes.com, Eric Savitz & Kwin Kramer,  August 2, 2012  
  • Before You Sign That Cloud Contract 7/23/12When a business moves to the cloud, it hands off its servers, its networks, and even its data to its provider. All that it has left is a contract. Given this, CFOs need to ensure that their cloud contracts are comprehensive, balanced, and enforceable, preferably in legal jurisdictions that suit the needs of their companies. Here ...
  • Sorry 7/16/12This post is no longer available.   
  • Getting To The Core Of Energy Management 7/09/12At its core, the green movement is about reducing energy consumption, which in industry parlance is also known as demand-side energy management. Successful demand-side management involves making energy consumers aware of how much energy they use on a regular basis, and then offering them effective ways of curtailing that use. The most effective methods for curtailing energy ...
  • Stop Working All Those Hours 6/25/12“He’s one of my best employees. He always puts in ten-hour days, sometimes much more.” Is this how your boss judges you and your colleagues? Probably yes, according to a 2010 study published in Human Relations. In the study, a group of researchers led by business professor Kimberly Elsbach conducted extensive interviews of 39 corporate managers. ...
  • The Six “Must Haves” To Use Mobile Devices in Manufacturing 6/18/12Mobiles are becoming popular in the Manufacturing Industry for real time reporting, quick analysis and the ability to pinpoint problems from the road. Here are six key features that Mobile Apps must offer to be effective in manufacturing environment: Read Full Article Source: invensysopsapplications.blogspot.com, Jan 9, 2012.
  • Why Antivirus Companies Fail to Catch Viruses 6/04/12A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from Iran. It was sent by an analyst from the Iranian Computer Emergency Response Team, and it was informing me about a piece of malware their team had found infecting a variety of Iranian computers. This turned out to be Flame: the malware that has now ...
  • How to Conquer Your E-Mail Inbox 5/29/12Many workers describe e-mail as the bane of their existence. The constant barrage of digital communication interferes with productivity. Mark Hurst, 39, a business consultant and author of the book Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-Mail Overload, has devised a method he says will change your life by managing your e-mail ...
  • 8 Things Great Bosses Demand from Employees 5/14/12My recent column, 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses, drew a flood of responses. But there’s one thing I didn’t mention: An extraordinary boss communicates his expectations clearly to his team. That way, everyone understands what it will take to make your company succeed. With that in mind: If you are the boss, you’ll want to ...
  • New Windows and SQL Server Support 5/01/12If you are having issues viewing the document, Click here to download the PDF. If you are having issues viewing the document, Click here to download the PDF.
  • Carpe Diem’s charts of the week 4/17/121. The Newspaper Association of America reported that advertising revenue for print newspapers in the U.S. fell to $20.7 billion in 2011. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the lowest annual advertising revenue for newspapers since 1951, sixty years ago. It took 50 years to go from about $20 billion in inflation-adjusted annual newspaper ad revenue in ...
  • Software: Only As Useful As The Users Are Trained 4/10/12I love Evernote. I use it every day for dozens of things. I keep a list of books that I want to read on it, RSVPs for events, and even my To-Do list. Evernote is a smartphone app that you can also download to your personal computer. Aside from handling lists, you can also import images ...
  • CIOs’ Love-Hate Relationship with the Cloud Revealed 3/23/12For information technology leaders, cloud computing offers opportunities to make their jobs easier and help business technology shine. But what does it mean to be an IT leader in an era of do-it-yourself IT? Two new surveys suggest as cloud moves into the mainstream of business, it brings new sources of anxiety as well. A new ...
  • Essential Leadership Lessons From The Girl Scouts 3/13/12One hundred years ago on March 12, 1912, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low gathered 18 girls in Savannah, Georgia with the intention of shaping girls into confident, courageous leaders. Since that first meeting, nearly 60 million women in the U.S. have donned those green uniforms. With 3.2 million members currently active, it is one ...
  • Side by Side Photos of the Japanese Tsunami: Then and Now 3/06/12Last year’s tsunami in Japan caused what is estimated to have been the most expensive natural disaster ever, with more than 15,000 lives lost. See before-and-after photos.
  • Jargon Madness 2/21/12The next time you feel the need to reach out, touch base, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team, by all means do it. Just don’t say you’re doing it. Because–and please believe us–all that meaningless business jargon makes you sound like a complete moron. To help rid the earth ...
  • Just How Important Is Manufacturing? 2/21/12Having a strong domestic manufacturing base is vital to the United States maintaining its world leadership in innovation. That is because advanced manufacturing provides an important institutional foundation for learning and developing process skills and capabilities that are increasingly intertwined with core R&D in some of the industries most important to the country’s economic future. ...
  • Is Siri coming to the IPad 3? Five iPad 3 Rumors That Just Might Be True 2/14/12It’s looking almost certain that Apple is planning a March launch for its highly anticipated iPad 3. The question on everybody’s mind is whether the third-generation tablet is going to be a revolutionary step for Apple, or a repeat of the iPhone 4S, with decent but not terribly exciting upgrades? Rumors are floating about the internet, ...
  • U.S. Manufacturing Competitiveness in Global Trade 1/17/12Those of us ensconced in debates in support of U.S. manufacturing often hear opponents claiming that the over-regulated U.S. labor market and unionized heavy industry render us uncompetitive in global markets. That may sound convincing given competition from emerging markets, but there are lots of advanced economies with long records of positive net exports, while we ...
  • Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds on the Internet 12/30/11In a single minute there are over 695,000 status updates on Facebook. That’s just one example of the mind boggling scale of online activity. The following infographics show a bunch of other incredible things that happen in 60 seconds… Source: Business Insider, Gus Lubin, December 2011 Read Full Article
  • MES Decisions: Now Easier Than Ever 12/30/11Deciding whether you need a manufacturing execution system (MES) is easier than ever, yet deciding how to proceed is more difficult than ever. Sound confusing? It might be—or it might not be. For about 20 years, people have been asking me: “If my company has modern automated controls and an effective enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, ...
  • NAM/IW Q4 Survey: Manufacturer Optimism Spikes 12/22/11Manufacturers are becoming more confident in the economy as the year is winding down. In the last NAM/IndustryWeek Survey of Manufacturers — which was released in September 2011 — respondents were mostly positive, but they were significantly less optimistic than earlier in the year. They were confronting a number of challenges, thus increasing anxieties and ...
  • Invensys Closing the Loop on Enterprise Control 11/08/11Live from the Paris installment of Invensys’ OpsManage series of user conferences, Sudipta Bhattacharya, president and CEO of Invensys Operations Management, chats with Control’s Walt Boyes on the range of new products and technologies to be demonstrated this week at the North America event in Nashville. On the heels of announcing a successful first half ...
  • The Institute of Supply Management’s Manufacturing Report on Business 10/11/11DO NOT CONFUSE THIS NATIONAL REPORT with the various regional purchasing reports released across the country. The national report’s information reflects the entire United States, while the regional reports contain primarily regional data from their local vicinities. Also, the information in the regional reports is not used in calculating the results of the national report. ...
  • How Angry Birds are Affecting Productivity 10/04/11Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much money American companies lose because people watch the NCAA basketball tournament instead of working. Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the consulting firm that makes such estimates, has tried their hand at other games ...
  • Let’s start hiring! US Manufacturers Plan to Increase Hiring 9/12/11Despite growing worry about the economy, politics and commodity prices, most U.S. manufacturers in a new survey said they would increase hiring by 7 percent over the next year. The survey was done this summer by RSM McGladrey, a national accounting, tax and business consulting firm that has an office in Madison. It found 76 percent ...
  • 7 Lessons CEO’s Can Learn from Steve Jobs 9/07/11The internet is crawling with stories about Steve Jobs’ retirement from Apple. And so are the newspapers. Steve Jobs has been an iconic chief executive and has truly changed the way that the world consumes media – and has blazed the technology trail for the future. The iPhone and the iPad have inarguably changed the ...
  • Data historians provide effective decision support in near real time 5/06/11Plant data historians are moving beyond their traditional role as a tool for collecting and archiving data to better understand past plant performance, to becoming a powerful tool that can be used to improve real-time operations. With increased data throughput and higher data resolutions, historians have also become a foundation for plant asset management initiatives, ...