Manufacturing Executive

Author Archives: Diane Himes

SAP’s ‘Cloudy’ Outlook

As the ERP giant strives to advise companies not just on weathering, but capitalizing on, the economic storm, it will be interesting to see how it does so itself...

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National CTO Can Take Cues From Manufacturing

 the ability to drive change in organizations set in the old ways of thinking — and can take some examples from U.S. manufacturers doing just that.

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And Now For Some Positive News…

Student interest in IT and computing is up. But what about business and finance?

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You Twit!

Let’s face it — if we didn’t waste time on the Internet we’d do it somewhere else.

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What Can Obama’s CTO Do for U.S. Manufacturing?

The appointment of a CTO at the federal level shows that the government is concerned with the same issues all businesses face, including the need to exploit 21st century technology...

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Customer Loyalty, at What Cost?

In response to consumer backlash over the fairness (and logic) of early termination fees, cellular carriers have been reevaluating their policies in recent months. The logic of the fees supposedly is that they help protect the carriers’ revenue in exchange for subsidizing the cost of the handset. But why should people sign a contract for a fixed period of time in order to curtail the initial cost of a device that will be long outmoded by the time they’re freed from that agreement?

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Long Live the LHC

Although it remains to be seen what exactly will be gleaned from the Large Hadron Collider, it has at least provided something of a needed distraction, for U.S. citizens at least, from the chief topics of the day: the mounting financial crisis and the debate over which political party has chosen the sillier presidential running mate...
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Changing for the Better

There’s no shortage of theories on the reasons for the flagging state of U.S. manufacturing, and surely a confluence of factors is to blame. But I think part of the issue is that somewhere along the line Americans got lazy, assuming a sense of entitlement in certain industries where we’ve traditionally been leaders.

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Competing on Innovation

A new report available free of charge from the Council on Competitiveness looks at companies using high performance computing for innovation processes across four major industrial sectors. Among the report’s key findings is that energy companies are leading the way on the use of technology.

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One Hand Washes the Other…

During his presentation Thursday at Managing Automation’s fourth-annual Progressive Manufacturing Summit in Las Vegas, Rexam CIO Paul Martin described his company’s plans of attack for implementing best practices across the organization. It’s perhaps not particularly surprising that the world’s largest aluminum can manufacturer actively engages in, as Martin said, a “relentless pursuit of operational excellence” in all areas of the business, from financial lean and Six Sigma practices to best-in-class IT processes, and from the supply chain to the factory floor. 

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