It has been roughly four decades since industrial robots - with mechanical arms that can be programmed to weld, paint and pick up and place objects with monotonous regularity - first began to transform assembly lines in Europe, Japan and the U.S. Yet walk the floor of any manufacturer, from metal shops to electronics factories, and you might be surprised by how many tasks are still performed by human hands - even some that could be done by machines.
For 130 years, Chicago and New York City have been locked in a battle of the skyscrapers. Nine of the tallest buildings in the U.S., as well as more than one-half of the nation's towers greater than 785 feet, were built in just those two cities.
Retailers are already planning for the busy holiday shopping season, and there could be a complication this year. As the unemployment rate drops, stores are having a hard time finding workers for their warehouses. They've ordered all kinds of new stuff for the holidays, but it's stuck in a bottleneck.
The largest U.S. retailers reported strong online sales in their second-quarter earnings reports recently, extending a trend that has seen e-commerce revenue expand far faster than store sales, and several said they are making strides in delivering goods to consumers more profitably.
In June this year a robot crushed a man to death in a Volkswagen factory in Germany. The 22-year-old maintenance worker became trapped between a large robotic arm and a metal plate, in an area usually off-bounds to humans.
Barcodes are indispensable for the exchange of vital data. It's time we recognized the important contribution that barcode printers make to the success of a company's supply chain – and to its bottom line.
The North American robotics market is off to its fastest start ever in 2015, according to statistics released from Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the industry's trade group.
Oh, sure, go on and do it by yourself. Just try to run the company without any help. Treat suppliers like you don't need them. Go on! If there's a recipe for disaster, that's probably it: acting like you don't need anybody else's cooperation, input or ideas. The reality is quite a bit different though, isn't it? No company, no supply chain, exists in a vacuum. We do rely on each other, because no one of us can do it all, successfully, by ourselves. We need partners. Ah, but which partners – which ones are right for you?
Warehouse personnel are adopting order fulfillment technologies, re-organization techniques, and picking optimization methods to create efficient operations to answer the growing demands of customers.
For many manufacturers and distributors, a seamless supply chain of highly efficient and tightly integrated business processes sharing a single unified source of accurate real-time data seems an unachievable goal. That's not surprising since such organizations are struggling to gain control over their entire supply chain using a mix of disparate systems that fail to fully mesh with one another creating silos of outdated and unreliable information.
