zaxis
Random Thoughts About Reshoring and Buying American
What will be the effect of the supply chain disruptions of recent years? Here are several observations related to where companies produce and how we think about a manufactured product’s origins.
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Why Towns Want Manufacturing Plants
A manufacturing facility can harness and focus the native ability of people growing up in a town, and channel this into livelihoods and homes for the town’s next generation. Is this something we lost sight of and are now seeing again?
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4 Steps to a Cobot Culture: How Thyssenkrupp Bilstein Has Answered Staffing Shortages With Economical Automation
Safe, economical automation using collaborative robots can transform a manufacturing facility and overcome staffing shortfalls, but it takes additional investment and a systemized approach to automation in order to realize this change.
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Can Connecting ERP to Machine Tool Monitoring Address the Workforce Challenge?
It can if RFID tags are added. Here is how this startup sees a local Internet of Things aiding CNC machine shops.
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The Tension Between Current and Coming Markets Cannot Be Resolved
A healthy business needs to keep that tension alive. That observation is one of several I have come to through my role during the past several years.
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Does Metal Additive Manufacturing Belong in a Machine Shop? The Answer Is Mixed
Machining is a necessary capability for metal part production through 3D printing, but succeeding with metal AM demands a role and procedures much different from those of many machining providers.
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Cutting Tool Inventory: A Big Concern for Small Shops
A job shop might have an amount of money tied up in tooling equal to a significant share of its investment in CNC machines. Here is how one shop owner thinks about tool management.
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Will the “Great Resignation” Become an Opportunity for Manufacturers? Get Ready for the Returning 3 Million
The Great Resignation will become a Great Reapplication when employees currently able to stay out of the workforce return to it looking for something better. Machining employers that are already evaluating candidates for fit, without demanding specific skills coming in, might be positioned well to draw upon this wave.
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IMTS 2022 Review: Attention to Automation Extends Beyond the Robot and the Machine
The advance toward increasingly automated machining can be seen in the ways tooling, workholding, gaging and integration all support unattended production. This is the area of innovation I found most compelling at the recent International Manufacturing Technology Show.
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Building a Better Business: Lessons for Machine Shops From an Unexpected Source
Learning how to be a great manufacturer by listening to the insights of a different industry, homebuilding (which perhaps is not so different after all).
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