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.
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.”
Have you ever heard of Moore’s Law? According to Intel founder Gordon Moore, electronic devices double in speed and capability about every two years.
Congressman Kevin Cramer supported bipartisan legislation passed by the House of Representatives to provide tariff relief on imported goods for American manufacturers.
74% of supply chain companies have experienced supply chain disruption at least once, based on a recent Business Continuity Institute study. A similar number of respondents (72%) admitted to not having full visibility of their supply chain. Lou Feretti, Project Executive at IBM, and Pierre Mitchell, Chief Research Officer at Spend Matters, discussed supply chain risk in a webcast on 5/4. The two pointed out the challenges and complexities of supply chain risk, and how to overcome them. One issue that was frequently brought up was the visibility within the supply chain.
Real GDP grew 3.2 percent in the third quarter, boosted by strength in consumer and business spending and net exports and extending the 3.1 percent gain seen in the second quarter. According to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, manufacturing added 0.24 percentage points to top-line growth in the third quarter, with mixed results for the sector. Real value-added output grew by 2.0 percent for manufacturers in the third quarter, buoyed by a 7.5 percent growth rate for durable goods firms but weighed down by a 4.1 percent decline for nondurable goods businesses. The latter were hit hard by recent hurricanes, especially in chemical and energy markets.
The most important aspect of starting a food manufacturing operation is Food Safety. Nothing will be more important to you and your business than never having a customer become sick, or injured, or worse from consuming your product. Food Safety in the food manufacturing world is overseen by the FDA, State and Local authorities, and many times large distributors of your product. Generally this oversight will consist of on-site audits. An auditor will walk through your operation from start to finish and will conduct a paperwork review of your production records.
The second draft of the update to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's cybersecurity framework, NIST 1.1, may prove to be more impactful than the original version released in 2013, Larry Clinton, president and CEO of the Internet Security Alliance (ISA), said Wednesday.
Manufacturing remains a critical force in both advanced and developing economies. But the sector has changed, bringing new opportunities and challenges to business leaders and policy makers.
Lean Certification is an evolutionary journey where your knowledge and experience work together to create a depth of expertise upon which you can keep building. It weaves innovative ways of thinking and doing business with real-world applications and results. Lean Certification not only helps you attain the knowledge, it validates it. It is the only nationally recognized Lean Certification program; using standards developed and judged by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) in partnership with Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) and the Shingo Institute.