We are seeing large surges in COVID cases around the country and we are heading into winter when we tend to remain indoors for longer periods of time. It's important to consider optimizing your workplace ventilation to continue to provide a healthy workplace for your employees. Here is some guidance from OSHA on things you can do to optimize air flow and air turnover in your facility.
There is a lot of conversation right now about reshoring, but not about its relevance to small and medium-sized manufacturing firms. The basic premise of reshoring is easy to understand – bring jobs back to America by encouraging companies currently offshoring to “reshore” and purchase labor or materials from a U.S. firm. This in turn benefits the local economy and stabilizes the buyers’ supply chain by not relying on overseas partners.
This is an original article by Custom Direct, Inc.
Vintage is all the rage, but out-of-date details on your website are never in style. Your site is filled with important information about your business. In many ways, it becomes your round-the-clock salesman, accounting for much of the decision-making process conducted by potential customers. Ensuring website content is up-to-date and reliable is key in establishing legitimacy and trust - making the difference in gaining a new customer, or losing a sale. Here are the 5 areas of your site which might need updating. Some of these are “quick” fixes, while others may require a bit more effort. Regardless of time involved, each item on this checklist is valuable to your digital presence, and should be reviewed for accuracy:
Written by Steve Sandercock and Greg Thompson.
During step 1 (Preparing the Worker), you are responsible for putting the person at ease to start the training. This may be a good time to discuss any concerns the learner my have about the current situation with Covid 19. Perhaps introduce all the safety measures your company has taken to keep the participant safe during this pandemic.
Written by Nicole Ausherman, Digital Information Specialist - NIST MEP.
Women make up about 29 percent of the manufacturing workforce despite filling 47 percent of the positions in the overall workforce, according to the Manufacturing Institute. While there have been periods of growth and decline, the dynamic is mostly unchanged since 1970, when women held 27 percent of the manufacturing jobs.
Illinois machine shops are a critical component of the small and mid-sized manufacturing community and are the foundation of metal manufacturing supply chains. This sector is highly competitive, and success is dependent on understanding where you stand in comparison to your counterparts and identifying areas of improvement – a tool like benchmarking can provide powerful insights. IMEC is partnering with Gardner Intelligence and the Modern Machine Shop’s Top Shops Program to provide a fully-funded opportunity for forward-thinking machine shops to attain custom reports and benchmarking analysis of their current operations.
Lean manufacturing uses many lean tools to improve production and efficiency by getting the most out of each resource. The goal of lean manufacturing is to find better ways to do things – requiring less effort, less time, and fewer resources.
Reshoring and keeping strong domestic supply chains are an even greater imperative based on what we have learned in the COVID crisis. One way to address reshoring is to focus on imported items. That's why IMEC is partnering with the Reshoring Initiative to provide a fully-funded opportunity for small and mid-sized manufacturers (SMMs) to play a vital role in import substitution for the components they can supply right here in Illinois.
