Most Recent

• Lessons from mentor-mentee relationships

  By Billy Hamilton, Motion Industries

  For much of my career, I was the stereotypical young, up-and-coming high-potential employee. I worked hard, positioned myself to learn new aspects of my craft, and relocated my family numerous times in an effort to prepare myself for “the next move” in my career. Now that I am in my 50s, I…

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• Why apprenticeships, outreach, diversity speak to the next generation of manufacturing leaders

  By Alexandra Ditoro

  It’s an all-too-familiar refrain in industry that manufacturers are struggling to meet their workforce needs because young people today are less interested in trades careers and/or would rather go to work for a big-name consumer tech company than an industrial manufacturing business. But part of…

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• Tired of data-logging lags, this engineer built his own mobile-first CMMS

  By Christine LaFave Grace, managing editor

  Ryan Chan is the founder of and CEO at UpKeep Technologies, a mobile-first CMMS software solution with more than 11,000 customers. Chan trained as a chemical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and took a job in manufacturing. After finding the process for entering repair orders…

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• Cost vs. value in vent gas compressors

  By Heinz P. Bloch, P.E., Process Machinery Consulting

  Vent gas compressors fit in a category of positive displacement machines often used in low-cost petrochemical plants. As a general rule and compared with other available options, sliding vane compressors are selected for vent gas duty by user-purchasers whose emphasis is on low initial cost. If…

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• Workforce development: Why there's no one-size-fits-all approach to mentoring

  By Christine LaFave Grace, managing editor

  Nandita Gupta remembers her first couple of days on the plant floor as a process controls engineer at a Georgia-Pacific factory in North Carolina. And, in particular, the 26-year-old remembers being mistaken as “the new HR girl” rather than the new controls engineer.In a time when manufacturers…

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• Go-go gadget mobile condition monitoring

  By Sheila Kennedy, CMRP, contributing editor

  Maintenance and reliability pros seeking to work smarter and go farther have numerous portable condition monitoring options that aim to support them in that endeavor.Vibration monitoringFor companies starting to look at vibration measurements on their assets, Hansford Sensors’ HS-620 Vibration…

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