Impact Dakota Blog is a blog dedicated to supporting North Dakota’s manufacturing community improve People, Purpose, Processes and Performance. Entries provide information on opportunities, new ideas, quick tips, celebrations of success, and well, frankly, anything to help you become a better manufacturer.
It was minutes before the end of the first shift, and the beginning of the second, and the hallways at the chicken plant swarmed with workers coming and going. One pulled a hairnet over her curly hair, giggling at a joke. Two others exchanged kisses on the cheek. A woman with a black ponytail hugged everyone within reach. And a thin, ashen woman, whom no one greeted or even seemed to notice, suddenly smiled.
Seeing more electric cars on the road? Last year, sales of electric vehicles (EVs) charged forward, as environmentally minded consumers found less expensive, longer-range models on the market.
How do you get students to pursue manufacturing careers? In most cases, it’s not so much up to you as them. Per a study conducted by The Manufacturing Institute, SkillsUSA, and the Educational Research Center of America, 64% of students enrolled in Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses say that their own interests and experiences are the most important factor in choosing a career path.
As a consumer, it’s nearly impossible to get away from videos, advertising or otherwise. To give you a numeric sense of our collective obsession with online moving images...
How can you make sure your Manufacturing Day event is a success? One of the most important things to do is to establish a connection with your guests.
Much has been written about the rise of China as an economic and geopolitical force. Let’s break off one chunk this week: China’s role as a major player in digital technologies at home and around the world.
The coming decade offers a host of challenges and opportunities for both large and small manufacturers alike, and forging the right partnerships — whether public, private, or both — is key to navigating the coming changes.
As Heraclitus said, change is the only thing constant in life. In the context of manufacturing it seems that there is almost a prescribed course—a road map with regularly spaced forks, one always leading to growth and prosperity, requiring change, and the other to stagnation resulting from fear of change, i.e., doing nothing and hoping that the definition of insanity is just a myth.
A recent study by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte revealed that more than 8 out of 10 Americans acknowledge the importance of the manufacturing industry but less than one-third of those surveyed would encourage their children to pursue a manufacturing career due to concerns around job security and stability, weak career paths, and poor pay.
When science and technology meet social and economic systems, you tend to see something akin to what the late Stephen Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium” in his description of evolutionary biology. Something that has been stable for a long period is suddenly disrupted radically—and then settles into a new equilibrium. Analogues across social and economic history include the discovery of fire, the domestication of dogs, the emergence of agricultural techniques, and, in more recent times, the Gutenberg printing press, the Jacquard loom, urban electrification, the automobile, the micro-processor, and the Internet. Each of these innovations collided with a society that had been in a period of relative stasis—followed by massive disruption.