Dean is a passionate and enthusiastic industry expert with over 30 years of experience and demonstrated success under his belt. He is driven by his desire to help people and believes in doing business with people, not companies. For the last year at IMEC, Dean has demonstrated his passion by working with and helping a wide range of organizations to create competitive futures in Northern Illinois.

This is an original infographic from NIST Manufacturing Innovation Blog.

Manufacturing industries as varied as automotive, electronics, chemical products and food already use collaborative robots (cobots) for tasks such as assembly, loading and packaging. The partnership between humans and cobots is an important one that combines tasks and drills with thoughts and skills.

This is an original article written by Jon Berbaum, President of Highland Solutions.

Journey maps are very popular tools at the moment, and with good reason. They’re a simple, fast, and effective way to help a team understand the experiences that customers are having with an organization from the customers’ point of view.

This is a guest blog, written by Alec Alessandra, M.B.A, former John Deer Executive, former IMEC Board Member, and Senior Strategist of Strategic Impact Partners, and Robert Pojasek, Ph.D, Senior Strategist of Strategic Impact Partners.

Many small and medium-sized supplier organizations are receiving notices from their larger sourcing customers to implement a variety of different international standards at their facilities. These standards could include:

• ISO 9001: 2015 (for quality)
• ISO 14001: 2015 (for the environment)
• ISO 31000: 2018 (regarding risk management)
• ISO 45001: 2018 (covering health and safety)
• ISO 50001:2018 (covering energy management)
• The Ethical Trading Initiative Program

This is an original article, written by Buckley Brinkman, the Executive Director/CEO of the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity (WCMP).

Reluctance to Employ Cobots Driven by 4 Common Misconceptions

It has been nearly six decades since the first industrial robots rolled on to a General Motors assembly line in Trenton, New Jersey. Today, a new generation of collaborative robots is changing how the manufacturing sector operates. These semi-intelligent machines are driving growth and improving efficiency not only for the GMs of the world, but also for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) as well.

The following is a description of MAPI Foundation's research on how AI is transforming the workforce, written by MAPI Foundation.

Manufacturing leaders are seeking strategies and solutions to address a burning question:
How will AI transform the workforce – the people, roles, skillsets – in the next 5 years?

THE CHALLENGE

Predictive maintenance, human-robot collaboration, and generative design are a few of the applications of artificial intelligence remaking manufacturing. Expectations continue to rise for AI to unlock elusive productivity gains. Industry leaders are adapting to the technological change — AI and related Industry 4.0 and IIoT technologies — that will continue to reshape their workforce, either through the automation and replacement of some workers or upskilling and new roles of others.

This is an original article written by Isaac Wright, a Cybersecurity Analyst and Trainer at Alpine Security.

It’s no question that in cybersecurity, defense is the best defense. In the constantly changing threat landscape, the tie often goes to the attacker, and businesses are forced to act like turtles putting up shells of security to ward off threats.  That is not always a bad thing; using a well-constructed defense- in- depth plan can greatly limit the likelihood of a successful attack.  I would like to believe we can get to a 99.99% level of security.  Even if that were true, that extra .01% keeps me up at night. What do we do if the controls fail? How do we respond then? What do we do the other 1% of the time? Once we find out that our emails have been hacked, or our money has been stolen is not the time to ask, “what now?” Even worse, what do you do when you suspect that an insider has embezzled funds and the evidence is located on their computer? Though we invest in and rely on our security controls, it is unfortunately not always enough.  We must have a plan for the .01%.

With 32 years in the industry and 5 years at IMEC as a Technical Specialist, Scott Czysz (pronounced: chish) is utilizing his expertise in leading Lean Transformations to assist organizations in Illinois create competitive futures.

We are all aware that technology is reshaping the economy – and now the workforce. It provides opportunities for companies to see their way through the ever-present workforce challenge - too many businesses cannot find the skilled workers they need, when they need them and where they need them.

This is an original article written by Jon Berbaum, President of Highland Solutions.

As a business or technology leader, you’re probably aware of the supposed virtues of “design thinking” these days. In my unofficial metric, it may soon surpass “digital transformation” or even “agile transformation” as the business strategy du jour.