In early August, Paul Davidson of the USA Today put a little grease on the wheels of a once great manufacturing nation. According to Davidson’s report, General Electric is moving the manufacturing of a new energy-efficient water heater from China to the United States.
If you've got a business and it occupies office space then these are interesting times if you're looking to maximize the potential of these working areas. An increasingly popular option for anyone with room to spare is to rent out any extra desk space, meaning that you can make all of your workstations earn their keep, even if the people using them aren't actually your employees.
At the end of April a large cloud of volcanic ash grounded half the world’s flights, costing airlines millions of pounds.
“Hey Dad, can I have your credit card number? I need to buy something online”. This is not just an annoying question my sixteen-year-old son seems to ask me two or three times a month. It’s a harbinger that e-tailing is set to go ballistic as soon as today’s teenagers get their first paychecks.
The UK has had to take a number of big steps into the unknown over the past couple of years, including public ownership of some of our High Street banks and the Bank of England’s programme of quantitative easing. And last most we took another as the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats came together to form the first coalition government since 1974.
The world of business is becoming increasingly connected and the manufacturing industry is no exception. We live in an age where the transfer of information is commonplace and used to great effect in developing new technologies. Sensors monitor everything from traffic flow to natural disasters.
The April issue was a landmark for us. Not only did it mark the start of the new financial year, it also saw us achieve our highest ever readership. It seems the new-look magazine is popular with you guys, and we thank you for your continued support.
Those within the industry are still looking for signs that the three main political parties have any serious plans to reform the economy, emphasising the importance of manufacturing.
It is clear we need a balanced economy to create jobs and wealth, but relying on the financial services sector for that is not sufficient.
A recent Royal Society paper acknowledged the National Physical Laboratory’s (NPL) hitherto unreported key role in the development of modern flat-panel displays. It brought to light the work of NPL’s Roger Partridge in the 1970s on organic solid-state emitters.
In their landmark book, “Lean Thinking” (2006), authors James Womack and Daniel Jones identified four key principles: value, flow, pull, and perfection. The origins of flow processing date back to the 1500s with Venetian shipbuilding.
