The Philosophy of Buy-In
Whew, finally back from a grueling two-week trip to New Hampshire. In addition to the politics and frustrations that go with working with multiple companies and egos, I also ended up in the hospital for a day with both a …
Category: Business
Manufacturing Terms, Buzzwords and Acronyms
As part of a consulting project I am involved in, I have created a list of acronyms and terms that are used in manufacturing and industrial automation. These are terms and acronyms from Lean/Six-Sigma, controls, electronics, business software and general …
Starbucks Roastery
A few weeks ago I made a trip to Seattle to visit my daughter Yuki and her family. She used to work at Starbucks’ corporate headquarters, and among other projects was involved in the design and startup of the Roastery, an …
Loving Your Automation
This week’s post is not really on automation, or anything technical. A couple of days ago I visited a local plant at the invitation of a consultant who is working with their management team to improve their processes. While this …
Automation Consulting, LLC Open House
When I started this blog back at the end of 2010 I really just did it for fun. At that time I wanted to make sure it contained useful information and was non-commercial in nature. Then I went back into …
Tagged with: Automation Consulting, Automation NTH, Automation Training, Mapvision, My Little Factory, Open House, Unitronics
Automate/Promat 2017
Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending my second Automate and Promat show in Chicago. I wrote an earlier post on the Automate 2015 show, but when I went back and re-read it I realized that I actually …
Tagged with: ABB, Adept, Arduino, Automate 2017, B&R Automation, Cognex, Doerfer, IIOT, Keyence, Machine Vision, National Instruments, Omron, Parker Automation, Raspberry Pi, Rexroth, Robot, Siemens, SMC, trade shows
So… What Do You Do?
Hello from mushy Sacramento, CA. Flying in this afternoon the whole area looked like a big sponge, everything looked flooded out, and its still raining. And I thought there was a severe drought here… ********************************************** Most people have heard this …
The Dangers of Not Using Local Vendors
In these days of online access to any product you can think of, it seems like your best option for buying technical products is to just find the best price and play vendors off against each other. I get offers …
Ethics of Automation
Today’s post is inspired by some of the comments I have received on a previous post from a couple of years ago on the advantages and disadvantages of automation. In that post (and in my book), I listed some of …
Tips on Starting an Automation Business
Today’s post is in response to Barry Brock, who asked: “I have been doing machine modifications and automating/upgrading machines for many years . I really am at a point of starting my own business and would appreciate any advice getting …
Engineering Ethics and Software
Back when I started doing software work directly for customers I must admit that I didn’t pay for the programming software that I used. This was in the days of DOS based programming software, and I had a laptop with …