Manufacturing Business Technology

• China economy hurts Mexico manufacturing employment
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  Mexican President Vincente Fox came to the U.S. this past summer in an attempt to bolster trade relations between the two NAFTA partners. The loss of manufacturing jobs in Mexico as U.S-based companies shutter "maquiladora" facilities—cross-border assembly plants—and shift production to China is of grave concern to Fox.
  
• McKinsey champions offshoring "value add"
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  A recent McKinsey Institute report tackles head-on the question of the value of outsourcing to the health of the U.S. economy. The public debate over the loss of jobs "is misplaced," the authors of the report state, "because the problem is neither trade itself nor globalization more broadly, but rather the question of how the country should allocate the benefits of global trade.
  
• Detailed traceability without the overhead
  
  By Roberto Michel, senior contributing editor, October 1, 2004
  Shaun McGinnis says the best way to visualize the large-scale data storage systems made by Hitachi Computer Products America is to think of "a refrigerator packed with boards and drives." That means the equipment is powerful, but at the same time, it's challenging to manufacture not only because of the assembly involved, but the testing and traceability requirements too.
  
• In brief
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  
  
• Vendors regroup around new CEOs
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  Manugistics and i2 Technologies both announced this past summer—within a 24-hour time frame—that leadership changes were in the works at the two supply chain planning (SCP) vendors. Manugistics appointed Joe Cowan as CEO, replacing Gregory Owens, who will remain chairman of the board.
  
• Beaver Street Fisheries stands to benefit from Wal-Mart's RFID mandate
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  A lot of manufacturers are quietly griping about the edict that soon will require RFID tags on all goods bound for Wal-Mart. But not Beaver Street Fisheries. The Jacksonville, Fla.-based distributor of frozen seafood volunteered to join Wal-Mart's 100 largest suppliers in meeting a January 2005 deadline for placing RFID tags on all cases and pallets shipped to the retailer's Dall...
  
• Data warehouse architecture is key to performance management
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  Business performance management (BPM) programs are only as good as the data feeding them. That's why industry experts stress the need for great care when designing architectures for data warehouses, which are the primary information repositories for BPM initiatives. "The most important thing to remember is that a data warehouse architecture must be flexible enough to accommodate fut...
  
• Hurdles to adopting IT standards
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  While companies generally accept the notion that remaining competitive requires devoting more of their IT budgets to systems that connect them with customers and suppliers, there appears to be a fairly high level of frustration with efforts to establish standards for implementing those systems.
  
• Auto parts maker says network traffic device eases global business
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  When Fisher & Co., St. Claire Shores, Mich., opened its first overseas product design office in Sweden, its engineers found it was taking an hour or more to download parts drawings via an Internet connection to the Fisher home office. "The drawings are stored in Pro/INTRALINK [an engineering data & collaboration package from PTC], which requires the files to be loaded to ...
  
• In brief
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  
  
• With Web services security, there's nothing to fear but fear itself
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  Security concerns often are cited as one reason why the use of Web services has yet to fully take off. But many of those fears may be irrational. "Existing standards are robust enough to protect against possible network intrusions or any other issues," says Eric Marks, CEO of AgilePath Corp.
  
• In brief
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  
  
• Study finds executive-level interest in BPM lacking
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  Business process management (BPM) is a topic of great interest in the corporate world, but apparently not as great a concern as it should be to the occupants of executive suites. That was the general conclusion of a study titled The State of Business Process Management, published by the BPMInstitute, Northboro, Mass.
  
• Why even corporate execs need to know something about metadata
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  Metadata sounds like something that would be of interest strictly to people who spend most of their lives locked in a corporate data center. But as companies start building IT infrastructures around service-oriented architectures (SOA), more people—including corporate execs—need to have some idea of what metadata means.
  
• Unit-level RFID tagging tried in pharmaceutical supply chain
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  A group of pharmaceutical manufacturers began shipping individual bottles with affixed RFID tags in July in an experiment to test application of the new technology at the item level to combat counterfeiting and furnish "pedigree" documentation of the movement of drugs throughout the supply chain, a requirement expected by both state and federal governments.
  
• Alien Technology uses licensed production method to reduce RFID tag price
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  One of the last big barriers to rapid adoption of RFID technology—tag unit costs—was breached this summer when Alien Technology ramped up its brand new fluidic self-assembly (FSA) line at its Morgan Hill, Calif.-based headquarters, jumping run rates from millions to billions of units per year.
  
• Capture standard attributes to reduce materials spend
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  By November of this year, International Truck and Engine Corp., Warrenville, Ill., expects to slash 6 percent to 10 percent from its spending on steel and aluminum sheet, thanks to software from Newview Technologies. Stampings manufactured from sheet currently are sourced by International from nine stamping companies, which in turn procure sheet from 26 steel and aluminum providers.
  
• The 80/20 rule for performance indicators
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  If you're like most manufacturing executives, you're being told that information technology today allows you to measure performance like never before. The question that remains is: How? "Everybody measures something, but coming up with a balanced, comprehensive measurement program is very challenging," says Debra Hofman, service director for AMR Research's Benchmark Analytix Group.
  
• Fastest-growing private business upgrades systems
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  This past summer found propane-powered mosquito traps in backyards across America. They aren't cheap—but enough consumers think they're worthwhile that sales have soared at American Biophysics Corp., a North Kingstown, R.I.-based manufacturer of the Mosquito Magnet. It's said that strong sales of the traps have turned American Biophysics into America's fastest-growing priva...
  
• Multinational alliance delivers MES for CNC environment
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2004
  An alliance of British, American, and German software and hardware companies has developed a turnkey manufacturing execution system (MES) for manufacturers with extensive computer numerical control (CNC)-driven production. Workloads across all CNC machines can be graphically portrayed and scheduled based on inputs from third-party ERP systems, or by a built-in MRP function for th...