You’ve heard of outsourcing—in fact, it’s been all too dominant in our news and conversations over the last few years. As lower manufacturing costs continued to emerge around the globe, more and more American corporations moved their production outfits to follow the cost savings—for some companies, this meant moving parts manufacturing overseas, and for others, [...]
DTNA (Daimler Trucks North America) announced on Thursday that it would be expanding the production at its Freightliner Truck Manufacturing Plant in Cleveland, N.C. by adding a second shift. The company estimates that this change will almost double their daily production of trucks and that it will create over 1,100 new jobs. Daimler Trucks exclusively [...]
Thousands of Americans are going without jobs right now—watching homes go into foreclosure, bills go unpaid and standard of living going down for themselves as well as their families. And many continue to look for jobs in the industries they worked in most recently—often hoping for comparable pay or similar benefits. However, a quick survey [...]
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado has developed some technological breakthroughs that will change the way we manufacture solar cells. The lab is sponsored by the Department of Energy and the new breakthroughs could not only save costs and reduce the environmental impact of producing “eco-friendly” power sources, but this innovations will also [...]
As we head into the new year, it looks as if the numbers for manufacturing all over the world and down and steady—showing no sign of improvement and boding poorly for global economies. The downward shift is especially apparent in several key manufacturing areas, such as the euro zone and Asia, a central manufacturing area [...]
We take the recycling to the curb knowing basically one thing: they’ll take this bin of recyclable goods away and magically turn it into new products. But many people don’t think of recycling as what it truly is: a manufacturing process. After the plastics are picked up from the recycling bin, they are separated from [...]
The quick answer to whether or not you should retrofit your manufacturing facility with new, efficient lighting is: yes, you should. But, there’s more to the decision than whether you should or should not—there are decisions to be made about who will do the retrofit. The truth is, your own maintenance staff could easily change [...]
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the prospect of bringing the Apple Corporation’s manufacturing of signature electronic devices like iPads and Macbooks onto home turf—as far as I can tell, it started when one well-intentioned but misinformed blogger proclaimed that brining the manufacturing profit margin home, from China where Apple’s devices are currently [...]
The numbers for November are finally coming together, and while manufacturing overall dropped by almost a half a percentage point, those declines were almost exclusively in the auto parts industry and may have reflected a shorter workweek in factories during holiday months. Although most sectors were down compared to the rest of the year, at [...]
The incandescent light bulb: a revolutionary invention that some have recently called outdated and inefficient. Congress even went so far in 2007 as to pass legislation that would have banned the production and sales of the incandescent bulb in America, starting in the coming year. With a last minute amendment, the ban was reversed. Congress [...]