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.
Four organizations will be selected for AIM Onshore’s Initial Prize ($150,000 each). After one year, the two best-performing initial prize winners will receive the AIM Onshore Final Prize ($250,000 for first place; $100,000 for second place).
Please join us to learn from expert keynote speakers, pertinent topical workshops and breakout sessions; not to mention great networking! Keynote speakers at the conference include, John Brandt, CEO and founder of The MPI Group; best-selling author Ross Bernstein; and Tony Richards, President/CEO of Impact Dakota.
Just as manufacturing has seen huge benefits from Lean, automation and advanced IT, Artificial Intelligence promises to be the next breakthrough in productivity improvement.
It’s critically important to create successful policy solutions for manufacturing to help this job machine thrive.
A recent survey conducted by a software industrial company indicated that a number of industrial companies are not taking cybersecurity seriously enough. The “Putting Industrial Cyber Security at the Top of the CEO Agenda” survey, that was conducted by Honeywell in collaboration with LNS Research, included responses from 130 strategic decision makers from industrial companies across North America, Europe, and other parts of the globe.
Over 45 percent of the manufacturing companies that the MEP National NetworkTM serves identify product development as one of their top three challenges over the next three to five years, while many say financing is also an issue. One product development funding source to consider is the federal Small Business Innovation Research (link is external) (SBIR) program. (Another option is SBIR’s sister program, the Small Business Technology Transfer (link is external) program (STTR), which requires participation with a non-profit research institution.)
With the new ISO 9001:2015 standard there is no longer the requirement for a documented quality manual. I have seen different reactions to this change: “Great, we will drop it all!”, “I am going to keep the one I have - just in case”, “We will copy the new standard and call it our manual. Like in the good old times.” Whatever your initial reaction, it is now your responsibility to answer the question: to keep or not to keep the quality manual?
As the former owner of a small manufacturing company, I know how important the manufacturing industry is to the local and national economy. Manufacturing is the backbone of the United States. It created strong communities and brought us together as a nation and helped the U.S. become an economic powerhouse. As the director of the incredible organization we call MEP, I want us to have the strongest manufacturing base on the planet.
There’s an apocryphal conversation between Hemingway and Fitzgerald where Hemingway observes that the difference between the rich and others is that they have more money. The accurate account is that Hemingway was talking with literary critic, Mary Colum. When Hemingway mentioned that, “I am getting to know the rich,” it was Colum who responded, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.”