Amazon made headlines on Black Friday 2013 with an announcement that the online retail giant is developing flying drones to deliver packages. The U.S. Army and some interests in Europe are in the process of developing driverless trucks. Now Rolls Royce makes it known that they’ve been developing unmanned cargo and container ships, and say…
As part of a government program headed by the Department of Defense, Chicago landed a hub for a digital manufacturing institute named the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute. The Department of Defense kicked in $70 million for the project, and the state, industries, academic community, and community supporters contributed an additional $250 million. The…
Following a series of accidents and explosions related to rail transport of the U.S.’s growing oil production, railroad executives and the Department of Transportation have agreed on eight new steps the industry plans to implement immediately.
Global transportation and logistics company UPS just announced its acquisition of the pharmaceuticals logistics company Polar Speed in the United Kingdom for an undisclosed sum of money. This acquisition comes during a lengthy process of UPS acquiring interests in the field of temperature controlled health care items, including the recent purchase of CEMELOG pharmaceutical logistics…
On March 17-20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the world’s largest trade show for the manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution festivals opens its doors. Professionals in these industries attend the Modex trade show to learn about the latest trends in these industries, the challenges these industries face in the near future,…
The Midwest and Northeast are used to rounds of winter weather, and normally have time to recover between storms. However, this year brought round after round of severe low temperatures, along with ice and snow, which make catching up the supply chain next to impossible. Delays are causing backups at important ports, delays of truck…
As construction resumes on the Panama Canal expansion, ports along the east coast rush to complete projects that would allow the humongous cargo ships of the P3 and G6 alliances to use their ports. So far, only the Port of Baltimore and the Port of Virginia in Norfolk can accommodate these ships. The ports of…
Manufacturers worry because they are unable to fill as many as 600,000 skilled labor positions, even in the midst of depressing unemployment numbers. While some argue this number is closer to 80,000, the consensus is that there is a skills gap, and the lack of qualified workers is only going to get worse. In fact,…
Growth in U.S. manufacturing is on the rise, while Europe and Asia’s manufacturing sectors are on the decline. The U.S. indices by Markit and the Institute for Supply Management indicated the U.S. manufacturing activity climbed to 53.2 in February, which marked a turn from the downward trend seen the previous two months. Much of the…
The year 2007 was, overall, the strongest year ever for American manufacturers. Hence, the Federal Reserve set this year as a baseline for the marketing index, released on a monthly basis, and set each sector of manufacturing to a base of 100 for the year 2007. Then those baselines are used to indicate how strong…