February 2016

For the third year in a row, the Internet of Things (IoT) was the talk of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Gadgets aren’t industrial equipment, however, and manufacturers need more than smart lightbulbs and wireless speakers. According to Forrester Research, IoT technologies are still “immature.” In fact, many are in the survival phase of Forrester’s TechRadar model. Does this mean manufacturers can ignore IoT then?

How much does your manufacturing company know about NIST MEP? And much does NIST MEP seem to know about you? Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) asked small-to-medium manufacturers to predict their top three challenges over the next three years. Do the answers that these companies provided reflect what challenges you?

What’s keeping you from becoming more innovative? In a recent article for Harvard Business Review (HBR), authors Tony McCaffrey and Jim Pearson suggest that our perceptions are the problem. Specifically, the authors cite three attitudes – functional fixedness, design fixation, and goal fixedness – that limit the way we think. Yet McCaffrey and Pearson also claim it’s possible to overcome these obstacles. Here’s how.

Would you like to cut product development and assembly costs? Would you like to do this while improving quality, reducing downtime, boosting morale, and eliminating material shortages? If you want to sell Industry 4.0 to your IT organization, you’ll need to emphasize the real-world benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT).