Most Recent

• 22 industry-leading women you should know: The Influential Women in Manufacturing 2018 eBook is now available

  By Christine LaFave Grace, managing editor

  Back in May, the editors of Plant Services and its sister publications at Putman Media announced the 22 members of Putman's inaugural class of Influential Women in Manufacturing. Now, we're honored to spotlight the honorees in the just-released Influential Women in Manufacturing 2018 eBook. In…

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• Tariffs, tech, and your supply chain

  By Christine LaFave Grace, managing editor

  John Caltabiano is VP, Global Supply Chain, at St. Petersburg, FL-based Jabil, a global manufacturing services company that works with 27,000 suppliers worldwide. He spoke recently with Plant Services managing editor Christine LaFave Grace about the mounting trade-related uncertainties that…

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• Building a more-efficient compressed air system

  By Bill Holmes, Holmes Autopilot LLC

  This case-study article reports on a project that was conducted at a 400,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Smithfield, NC, to determine and quantify specific opportunities to improve the efficiency of, reduce the operating costs for, and optimize the operation of the compressed air system. The…

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• Maintenance management: Don’t let small problems combine into a failure event

  By Heinz P. Bloch, P.E.

  When investigating why a machine fails repeatedly and seemingly at random, it’s good to remember that more than one deviation (or failure cause) may be involved. Letting deviations combine is risky, and if acceptance of deviations becomes the new normal, so to speak, failure risks can easily…

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• 5 trends propelling the compressed air industry forward

  By Ron Marshall, compressed air efficiency consultant

  Compressed air has been a go-to tool for a long time, and it might be easy to think that not much has changed in the industry. If we look closer, though, we can identify important developing innovations that will change the efficiency of compressed air systems worldwide for years to come. Some of…

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• Boost your profit via an energy audit

  By Frank Healy, Fluke

  For years, industrial and commercial facilities viewed their electrical utility bill as a cost of doing business. Then, energy costs began to spike as fossil-fuel costs rose to unprecedented heights – more than $100 per barrel in the case of oil. Concurrently, energy-efficiency technology…

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