Removing mental roadblocks to improving operations January 30, 2018 It’s a familiar scenario at the factory. Quality issues have reared their ugly heads, requiring rework, causing backorders, delaying shipments, and driving tense daily customer calls. Meanwhile, the team works to address production issues using a mix of day-old post-mortem reports, shop-floor observations captured on notepads, and other operational data summarized on spreadsheets and sticky notes.
Agile hardware development can quicken product lifecycle January 16, 2018 In today’s booming software landscape, you see highly dynamic teams quickly iterating to develop and improve their products. Yet while the world’s software creators have learned to “move fast and break things,” hardware developers are still (slowly) moving to adopt a more agile product development methodology.
Honda Details Work With Dassault on Planning Structure Capability October 23, 2017 To improve time to market and productivity at Honda, the Japanese automaker partnered with the French software giant Dassault Systèmes on planning structure, including a new model process development (NMPD) project, Ron Emerson said here this week at Dassault’s 3DExperience Forum North America event.
Seeing Shop-Floor Steps Clearly Helps Workers Quickly Learn on the Job November 30, 2017 VKS [Visual Knowledge Share] develops an electronic work instruction solution designed to improve quality, productivity, and efficiency.
Metrology Tools for Medical: A New Focus on Vision Systems November 6, 2017 Metrology for medical devices needs to become more capable as those devices get more varied and complex. Manufacturers must inspect dental implants, coronary stents, orthopedic joints, and implanted electronic devices. Surgeons are increasingly using intricate, sometimes one-off, surgical tools. There is also a growing number of consumable items, such as hypodermic needles, made on rapid production lines. They all need ever more precise quality control.
To Get on Industry 4.0 Path, Focus on the Here and Now October 11, 2017 Industry 4.0 is inevitable, and everyone is looking to find a way forward. But manufacturing leaders who focus only on the technology involved will be frustrated—because the new industrial revolution is just as much a culture and people thing as it is a technology thing.
AM, Big Data, VR, AR all crashing DFM’s party—in a good way October 17, 2017 Design for manufacturing has been around for decades, but industry insiders say the next few years will be critical as technologies like additive manufacturing (AM) and virtual reality (VR) shape the future of the industry.
SLM Solutions Exec Weighs in on Important AM Market Trends October 10, 2017 Winthrop Sheldon of SLM Solutions spoke with Editor in Chief Brett Brune at the Aerodef 2017 conference in Texas.
Advanced Shops Aim to be on the Top of their Game October 11, 2017 Shops looking for ways to improve productivity in traditional subtractive machining processes need look no further than ways to reduce setup time, improve spindle uptime, and implement CNC programming efficiencies. Shop managers overwhelmed by claims about the future of digitalization and Industry 4.0 can find ways to translate that exciting promise into their day-to-day operations—today.
Smaller manufacturers can use AR to keep eyes on prize October 12, 2017 As manufacturing becomes ever more complex, tools that assist workers with difficult or unfamiliar tasks are becoming critical to process efficiency and product quality. An explosion in the development of mobile, wearable, and augmented reality (AR) computing technologies has thus created a new world of possibilities for the manufacturing industry.
