Design & Manufacturing
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 [...]
Andres Morey and Samuel Wurzel are changing the way you shop for electronic parts. Andres and Sam, who studied physics together at Brown, then pursued PhDs in astroparticle physics and plasma physics respectively, are the founders of Octopart—a Google-esq search engine for electronic parts. Octopart makes it easy to compare the prices and availability of [...]
“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, [...]
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 [...]
If you’re part of an organization that’s scaling to production, we’ve got you covered with our scalable cloud PLM solution. But what if you’re just starting out? You need to capture and document parts, but without changes and a supply chain to manage, you may not be ready to implement a full-service solution. You may [...]
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 [...]
Choosing a part numbering scheme is one of the more important decisions you make as you move toward production. Once you commit to a part numbering scheme, you are married to it for a long time to come, so you need to be 100% sure it is nimble enough to evolve and scale right along [...]
With 80% of people residing within 50 miles of a coast, it’s not surprising that efforts to better understand and protect our oceans get a lot of attention. Our customer, Liquid Robotics, has been all over the news lately with their Wave Glider, an autonomous ocean-powered robot that can travel long distances, hold station and [...]
Now that I’ve given you a high level analysis of the pros and cons of intelligent and non-intelligent part numbering, I can tell you how I really feel. While well intentioned, intelligent numbering schemes can be a tricky rabbit hole—hostile to growth for a variety of reasons. A good part numbering scheme is nimble. It [...]
