Industry News & Trends
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 [...]
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 [...]
There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still. – Franklin D. Roosevelt In the last few years U.S. manufacturing has taken a hit, but with the nation focused on manufacturing job creation and education, 2012 promises to be a year of change for the industry. What do you think [...]
2011 was a year full of smart technologies. We met Siri, snuggled up with the Kindle Fire, worked up a sweat with the Fitbit Ultra and even discussed the possibility of a robotic takeover in manufacturing. It was a busy year, yet there’s one trend in particular that grabbed my attention—the rise of smart packaging. [...]
Do you remember HeathKit? The company that sold circuit board and resistor kits you could assemble to make your own electronics? Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. [...]
To everyone who waited so patiently while I got this write up together—thank you! And so you don’t have to wait a second longer, here it is, the 2011 Arena Solutions Manufacturing Outsourcing survey results. Click here to view survey results. Survey insights include some interesting differences in the specific benefits and challenges of outsourcing [...]
I know it’s taken forever, but I finally finished the Arena Solutions Manufacturing Outsourcing Survey report. (Whew!) We talked to 1004 respondents across the high-tech, medical device, consumer products, industrial, clean tech, automotive, aerospace, telecoms, contract manufacturers/EMS companies (et. all) segments, and I have to say—the resulting 10-page report is pretty fascinating. I’ll be publishing [...]
