Articles

Shifting demand and consumer preferences — like the demand for sustainable materials and reduced construction waste — are having a major impact on how construction firms approach new work, including the materials they choose for projects. The building materials industry,...

The goal of any vehicle scale service program should be to ensure that equipment stays in working order, with minimal downtime between service visits or the life of the product. The losses to revenue due to a scale failure...

Prefabrication is changing the current paradigm in the construction and building industry. Modular, factory-constructed built environments can be produced significantly faster, more economically and often safer than traditional field construction. Indeed, a report from industry advisory group McKinsey &...

Manufacturing is evolving. The industry once synonymous with long hours, assembly lines in dark and filthy plants, low wages, and antiquated processes have turned into one of the most lucrative business types for the future not only of the...

Today, even in highly automated production environments, standard operating procedures (SOPs) for startup/shutdown, material loading/unloading, line switchovers, clean-in-place, maintenance preparation and other tasks are still completed manually, using paper-based systems. Unfortunately, this creates a significant disconnect between equipment operators and...

In Lean manufacturing, the goal is simple: eliminate waste and keep what adds value. Now in widespread use, the principles of Lean provide value across markets for a variety of very different companies. However, standard Lean thinking alone cannot...

When chemical processors including those creating plastic, polymer or rubber products utilize batch reactors, following the recipe from batch-to-batch and plant-to-plant is critical to reliably and cost-effectively manufacture high value-added materials to spec. This typically involves charging the reactor,...

Successful people all do one thing: they solve problems. They don't just stare at a problem and wish it would go away. The magic key to solving your big, difficult, looming business problems is to break them down into smaller...

The most significant marketing challenge of our time is the scarcity of attention from potential customers. Bombarded relentlessly from all directions with too much information, a deluge of products and services, and too many unsubstantiated claims, potential customers have tuned...

After working on his own as an independent healthcare insurance broker for several years, Ryan recently took a job with a bigger brokerage. When he broke the news to his wife that the company he joined did not offer...