Arena Solutions, the leading provider of on-demand product lifecycle management (PLM) software for manufacturers of all sizes, today announced that Ritchey Design Inc. (www.ritcheylogic.com), a leading innovator in bicycle design and engineering, has chosen on-demand Arena PLM to streamline its current product development process, boost productivity and improve global communication and collaboration. Arena PLM will help the company speed the development and release of future products as well as enhancements to current products, including its highly innovative Break-Away Bikes, a line of ultra-light, racing-quality bikes that separate so they can be packed in a standard suitcase for easy travel. Ritchey will also integrate Arena PLM with its Box Solutions ERP system, further streamlining company processes by linking product planning with product execution.

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Nelson Engineering Co. is the latest engineering consulting company to implement Dyadem's FMEA-Pro software to deliver efficient, high quality reliability and maintainability assessments to its clients. A premier engineering design, operations and maintenance consulting firm, Nelson Engineering evaluates complex heritage and newly designed facility systems, equipment and utilities (FSEU) for the aerospace, environmental and defense sectors and the U.S. State Department.

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The late nineties saw most global businesses make a transition towards a paperless office. Today, the buzzword amongst major businesses is “Virtualization” . Employees connected to each other can share data and make business decisions on a real time basis. In the quest for virtualization, organizations are facing roadblocks during implementation in terms of Information security. Any compromise on the security aspect will leave the network vulnerable to attacks from a range of sources. Such connectivity if not secured will provide attackers the perfect medium to approach employees from the relative anonymity of the Internet.  

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As a plant manager for the past seven years, I had a unique opportunity to lead a lean manufacturing implementation in two separate facilities. The plants were similar in numerous ways. They were both building-products manufacturing facilities, both were continuous processes, both had roughly 300 hourly people, and they were both owned by the same Fortune 500 corporation.

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As it turns out, a small nudge is all it took to open a floodgate of innovation in water-efficient manufacturing.
Necessity is the mother of invention — but a little extra incentive never hurts either. WaterSense is providing that bit of incentive by raising consumer awareness about the need for water efficiency. Consumers, in turn, will drive a greater demand for innovation in water-saving technology. The Environmental Protection Agency created this partnership program in 2006 to protect the future of our nation’s water supply.

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In nature and most manufacturing processes no two things are ever exactly the same. There exist small variations from part to part or measure to measure. If you were to acquire metrics on features of 100 "identical" parts and plot the values relative to frequency, you would be plotting a histogram. For stable processes, the curve would most likely be a normal, or bell-shaped, curve. The analysis of the data in this fashion is called descriptive statistics.

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Breakthrough which marks the creation of the first living artificial heart could signal the beginning of the end of organ shortages, reports Roger Highfield

Doctors have stripped down and refurbished a dead heart so that it can beat again, an unprecedented feat that could signal the beginning of the end of organ shortages.

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In October of 2005, U.S. Gypsum Corp. began a plant optimization rollout across 50 manufacturing sites that produce gypsum wall board.

The goal was to unify its plants on one instance of Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) and offer visibility across all sites. “We wanted to make sure you could go to any plant and the processes would be exactly the same,” says Nat Parameswaran, director of business solutions in supply chain and e-business systems at Chicago-based U.S. Gypsum. “Even before we started the implementation, we did a process standardization across all plants.”

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"If it isn't in writing, it didn't happen." It's an old saying that engineers and everyone in your organization, private-sector or public, should be aware of. More important, everyone should know how to put the concept—documentation —into practice. Does that mean writing careful notes about any information conveyed orally? No, it means a lot more than that.

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Life can be cruel, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going. 

Liz Soden had been an active mother of 5 with a love of the outdoors when a tragedy turned her life around.  She still yearned for the outdoors and from that yearning was born the TankChair which is probably the ultimate off road wheel chair for the disabled
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Sir Edmund, who conquered the world’s highest mountain in 1953, had been suffering health problems since April after suffering a fall whilst in Nepal. While the New Zealander considered himself merely an average beekeeper, he was widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest adventurers.