Illinois small and mid-sized manufacturers will stay globally competitive by investing in modern technology and skillsets. Today’s workforce challenges make the case for technologies like automation almost a necessity. For example: Robots and “Cobots,” or Collaborative Robots, support (but not replace) workers while boosting productivity and efficiency. Data technologies, like artificial Intelligence (AI), can analyze data to make business recommendations. Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming a useful tool to train employees. But while major corporations have been quickly investing in this advanced machinery, smaller manufacturers have moved slower. We will look at why that is, and what can be done to change that.

This article is written by Winsor Consulting.

No one can completely avoid risk when it comes to their network security. Thankfully, there are steps that you can take to minimize your organization’s vulnerability! We will discuss 10 effective ways to reduce your organization’s network security risk.

This article is written by Webit.

Business leaders invest a lot of time and resources into cybersecurity because they understand that protecting sensitive data is a necessity in the digital age. One business component that often gets overlooked are business printers. They are also vulnerable to cyberattacks, so make sure to follow these tips to ensure your company stays protected.

This article is written by Webit.

Running a business has always been a challenge, but the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape has made it even more so. Every day, newer, more sophisticated cyberthreats emerge, putting businesses at risk of significant data, productivity, and financial losses. Implementing a proactive cybersecurity strategy is an effective way to keep these threats at bay and ensure continuous operations. Here’s how to do it.

In the spring of 2021, IMEC, Illinois Manufacturers Association (IMA), Technology & Manufacturing Association (TMA), and Valley Industrial Association (VIA) partnered with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research to survey manufacturers about their adoption of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies and processes, achieving a phenomenal 87% response rate.

Written by Matthew Inniger of Manager of the  Advanced Technology Program of CIFT, part of  Ohio MEP. This article first appeared on the NIST Manufacturing Innovation Blog. 

This is an exciting time in the food manufacturing industry. The innovations and technology associated with Industry 4.0 are making it easier for small and medium-sized manufacturers to overcome obstacles in ways that at one point would not have been considered. While manufacturers have previously been slower to move toward incorporating advanced industry technologies due to the high level of regulation and biologically complex products with which they work, innovation is becoming more widely accepted as a key to industry sustainability. Two examples of such Industry 4.0 technologies are automation and augmented reality.

This is an original article from Fast Radius.

When people think of additive manufacturing (AM), the first thing that often comes to mind is prototyping. When you need to iterate on a design quickly without the constraints of traditional manufacturing runs, AM works well because there’s no hard tooling involved, making rapid iteration possible.

Say what you want about 2020, but it forced each of us to push our personal and professional boundaries of accepting change and quickly adapting to our new reality. One of the greatest lessons we should take away from this year is that we are capable of accelerated change when forced to do so. We now know that we are capable of rapid change and it will be the norm in our professional lives moving forward. We now must embrace change more quickly than ever. With industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (iIOT) on our doorstep, we have the opportunity to make the greatest leap forward in manufacturing in 2021 that we have seen in 50 years.

Knowledge transfer for new employees is often the bottleneck to effective and efficient onboarding and can be a major source of downtime when the right knowledge is unavailable on-site. The RealWear HMT-1 provides solutions to these problems, and more, in an intuitive and safe way.

The COVID-19 crisis is rapidly accelerating our need to prepare for a digital transformation and creating a digital strategy will be a roadmap for the transformation. The “new norm” of navigating the digital landscape in COVID times, highlights the reality of moving past the buzz words and catchy phrases, to aspiring to undertake a digital transformation agenda with both near and long-term strategic objectives in mind. This crisis presents its challenges to digital transformation planning: while certain sectors of the manufacturing industry are thriving, others are battling the fast-paced changes, challenges, and constraints.