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Manufacturing ROI: Finding the Real Benefit  The big day is close. A team of senior executives from corporate—the people who hold the purse—are about to arrive.
Your job as a senior manager in the engineering department is to present the capital investment budget for the next year and persuade them to give the company money for the projects. Talk about pressure. Pretty much all of the 1,000 people in your company will know if you succeeded or failed.
This happened to me early in my career. My company was a manufacturer, but not every company in the conglomerate was. So the Senior Vice President and Executive Vice President who flew in more than likely had no more knowledge of what goes on in a plant than your typical Congressperson.
So, I assembled a list of machines that we wanted, details of what they would do, drawings that showed how and where they would be used and financial worksheets that proved (to my engineering mind) the quick payback. It was my turn in the barrel and I stood up to present. I went through the entire speech. The top executive of the visiting team looked at me as a professor might look at a freshman on his first day, and said, “Interesting, but just why should we invest in manufacturing at your company at all?” He was taking me to an entirely different level. And 30 years later, it’s a question that still follows me...
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» INFRASTRUCTURE: Darkened Economy Requires Better Machine Vision -
Ben Dawson has observed a downturn in business from end-users of vision tools—particularly in automotive and its linked industries such as electronics—since October 2008.
But October’s slide took until 2009’s first two months to show its real impact, remarks Dawson, director of strategic development for Billerica, Mass.-based machine vision supplier Dalsa IPD (www.goipd.com).
Dwight Carlson agrees that the automotive sector is experiencing a downturn, but only in the United States. “Definitely, Asia is where growth is,” says Carlson, chief executive officer of Coherix (www.coherix.com)...
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» INDUSTRIES: Pharmaceutical Industry Confronts Data, Change, Culture -
The pharmaceutical culture faces growing pains of gaining maturity.
For example, one company representative remarks, “We’re awash in data, but have no information.” That lament is what Alison Smith heard recently at a pharmaceuticals advisory board meeting of automation software supplier Aspen Technology Inc. (www.aspentech.com), Burlington, Mass., where she’s vice president of marketing strategy and research."
“This was a very apt statement. It applies to any environment in which technology has been deployed in the absence of an information design—and this is the case in most organizations,” Smith remarks...
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» TECHNOLOGIES: SOA Is How IT Does Business -
“SOA as a marketing term is dead,” proclaims Franco Castaldini, director of product marketing for Software AG (www.softwareag.com), in Reston, Va.
“It’s just the way IT does business.” Service Oriented Architecture, or simply SOA, has generated marketing buzz for the past few years, and it has gained critical mass in information technology (IT) shops and in software product development plans. Castaldini says the result of SOA work is an efficient and componentized layered approach for use by those who are building software applications...
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