Alyssa Sittig
Recent posts by Alyssa Sittig
It’s no surprise that outsourcing has changed the global manufacturing landscape over the last several decades, for better or worse. Outsourcing allows manufacturers to competitively price and scale up and down quicker, but with the diminishing number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., it has become controversial in some circles. One lesser-known consequence of outsourcing [...]
“If there’s one thing America loves, it’s power tools.” – Stephen Colbert Over 40,000 people visit the emergency room each year for table saw related injuries, and almost 4,000 of those people end up losing at least one finger. That’s a table saw accident every 9 minutes. 10 table saw amputations every day. Steve Gass, [...]
I’d like to take you on a journey through a world without product data exchange (PDX)—where OEMs and CMs rely on manually created print packages and zipped electronic files to share product information back and forth. Maybe this is the world you already live in. A journey through the dark days of file sharing In [...]
Part one: setting up your internal organization for scaling success Success often strikes when you least expect it, and when it does, will you be ready? This blog series will help you determine whether your business is ready to handle the challenges of an increase in production volume—and help you be prepared to scale when [...]
Our recent series on intelligent vs. non-intelligent part numbering schemes, prompted many of you to weigh in and share your own experiences on the topic. And we were pleasantly surprised to receive such a wide variety of opinions about intelligent vs. non-intelligent schemes. Your feedback on intelligent vs. non-intelligent part numbering schemes One reader, who [...]
What if you could download and print a physical component directly to your printer? The Pirate Bay (TPB) is confident that this will soon be a reality. The website just announced it is supporting a new type of file on its BitTorrent site—“physibles.” TPB uses this term to describe “data objects that are able (and [...]
When IndustryWeek released its annual ranking of revenue growth for the 500 largest publicly held U.S. manufacturing companies, it was exciting to see the progress made in 2011. Rather than another year of decline, these U.S. manufacturers saw 12.75% growth. That’s almost high enough to match Japan’s total 2011 GDP. Annual sales for petroleum and [...]
With the rising emergence of automation in the manufacturing world, brought on by increasing global competition and reinforced by events like Foxconn’s plan to integrate over 1 million robots into its assembly lines, it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of our electronic products are still largely assembled by hand. One Foxconn plant in [...]
Last week, I predicted that manufacturers would dramatically increase their adoption of cloud-based software as the benefits of cloud begin to outweigh any possible concerns. And upon further research, it appears that I am not the first to make this prediction. In 2011, Gartner released a report describing how heightened economic pressures and increasingly complex [...]
When you’re starting up, it can be difficult to know which business tools are essential to success and which can be put off until you have more capital and better market security. But there’s one place where you can’t afford to cut corners—establishing a fail-safe method to manage your product data. Navigating a product launch [...]
