It’s overly simplistic and unfair for politicians to demonize all manufacturers who offshore production as large corporations out to make an easy buck. Some are. But, in many cases, these are small enterprises that offshore only in recognition of unavoidable business realities. And they do so only as a last resort. ...

A few weeks ago, I ran the Falmouth Road Race, a 7-mile run along the coast of Cape Cod. It was a bit of a strange feeling knowing that I was going to be tracked — and as I stood amidst the thousands of runners waiting to step over the starting line I secretly doubted the RFID tag attached to my shoe would work. I didn’t know I was wrong, however, until I got home and found an e-mail in my inbox telling me the race results were in. I’d been followed every step of the way. Now, my only thoughts were, ‘This is so cool!’ ...

There’s no shortage of theories on the reasons for the flagging state of U.S. manufacturing, and surely a confluence of factors is to blame. But I think part of the issue is that somewhere along the line Americans got lazy, assuming a sense of entitlement in certain industries where we’ve traditionally been leaders.

I read with some surprise the recent news that Siemens would sue its former CEO Klaus Kleinfeld for his alleged part in the company’s enduring bribery scandal. It wasn’t long ago that we at Managing Automation reported that Kleinfeld was leaving Siemens without a whisper of malfeasance to sully his good name. In this and another high-profile corporate lawsuit we’ve been covering, we see that executives who have cut ties with a company can still be ensnared by its current events.

If you haven’t seen the new Pixar animation move Wall-E, go see it soon. The film is both poignant and funny, apocalyptic and hopeful. It also has, in addition to the good robots like Wall-E, evil robots that want to control and subjugate human beings. Being a technology journalist, one of the things that struck me most about Wall-E was, of course, the human qualities assigned to the robots. They sense, they feel, they can be happy or sad. Is all this really science fiction?

While salesforce.com and others have proven they can sell lots of software as a service and that they can keep the service up and running most of the time, few if any have demonstrated they can make anywhere near the kinds of profits that traditional software companies make. It seems increasingly obvious that current SaaS pricing levels should be viewed as "introductory" and that the costs involved in opting for software as a service will, inevitably, rise. ...

You know you’ve reached a tipping point when they make a movie about you. Think of what 12 Angry Men did to change the way people think about the judicial system and the power of persuasion, or what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did to educate and stimulate society to evaluate how our actions affect the environment. Now, if you switch on the tube to Spike TV Sunday nights at 10:00 p.m., you’ll see the new show, The Factory. ...

A new report available free of charge from the Council on Competitiveness looks at companies using high performance computing for innovation processes across four major industrial sectors. Among the report’s key findings is that energy companies are leading the way on the use of technology.

I’ve written before about counterfeit goods and the impact they have on brand owners and legitimate manufacturers worldwide. By now we’re all well aware of China’s reputation as the seat of counterfeit manufacturing. It’s been easy to point fingers at the Chinese government for standing idly by, but this past week, I walked into a confusing roller coaster of contradictions that changed my view...

Last week, a reported 1,500 people from the steel industry gathered in the Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan to discuss steel industry trends. The agenda for the meeting really reflected today’s realities, especially for U.S. steel makers. The topics must have produced much controversy during the day, but the sparks really flew on Tuesday night...

As unlikely as it may seem, one time supply chain software kingpin i2 Technologies Inc. is showing some signs of life. Recently, the company reported that it had received $66.4 million in order bookings during its first fiscal quarter...

During his presentation Thursday at Managing Automation’s fourth-annual Progressive Manufacturing Summit in Las Vegas, Rexam CIO Paul Martin described his company’s plans of attack for implementing best practices across the organization. It’s perhaps not particularly surprising that the world’s largest aluminum can manufacturer actively engages in, as Martin said, a “relentless pursuit of operational excellence” in all areas of the business, from financial lean and Six Sigma practices to best-in-class IT processes, and from the supply chain to the factory floor. 

In the 1970s futurist Alvin Toffler predicted in his book Future Shock that we would be living life at an accelerated pace in the 21st century. Now it’s upon us, and boy, was he right...

A lot of people say we're heading for a workforce crisis. We aren't graduating enough engineers to fill the manufacturing ranks of the future, which will increasingly call for their services. We're in for a massive retirement of Baby Boomers,

Last week, I traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to keynote PowerPlex 2008, the annual user conference for customers of Plexus Systems, a developer of on demand ERP and other software for manufacturers. It didn't hit me until I landed at

Not long ago we were reading and writing a lot about the notion of convergence between the worlds of telecommunications and computing. The notion was that these two once separate domains would come together, combining the benefits...

Given the fact that Mother's Day is just around the corner, I thought it would be appropriate to acknowledge another MOM that's made a huge difference in the industry. Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), otherwise known as manufacturing execution systems (MES),

While U.S. manufacturers brace themselves against the latest wave of bad economic news, manufacturers based in other parts of the world could stand to benefit from some of the factors giving American companies the shakes. So says Germany based supply

What should a manufacturing executive make of the mercurial history and cloudy future of RFID technology? One day (and in one publication) the outlook's sunny, the next barcodes are predicted to live forever, and their cousin, RFID,

We know that this year’s crop of Presidential candidates isn’t really all that interested in manufacturing. Now it appears that they aren’t that interested in science either. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal yesterday ...