This article originally appeared in Managing Automation. U.S.-based hard disk drive maker Seagate Technology International today won the prestigious Singapore Manufacturing Excellence Award. The award, presented by Singapore’s Economic Development Board in cooperation with McKinsey & Co. and the Singapore-MIT Alliance, considered such factors as product innovation, systems innovation and operational excellence. Read full article (free registration required). … Read more »

This article originally appeared in Managing Automation. In yet another sign that China is now at the forefront of manufacturing, ABB Robotics has moved its world headquarters from Detroit to Shanghai, China. ABB Robotics is part of Switzerland-based ABB Group, and is a world leader in automation technology. Decades ago, the company was the first to market a microcomputer-controlled, all-electric industrial robot. Read full article (free registration required). … Read more »

This article originally appeared in Managing Automation. China may be the low-wage manufacturing capital of the world, but not every company comes here to save money on labor. Instead, as China develops its own economy, companies are opening plants here to be close to customers, to be close to raw materials, and for other strategic reasons. Clariant, for example, a leading specialty chemicals company, is close to finishing construction on a state-of-the-art pigments plant in Hangzhou, about three hours from Shanghai. Read full article (free registration required). … Read more »

This article originally appeared in Managing Automation. SHANGHAI — About two dozen supply chain executives from around the world gathered here earlier this month to discuss the business-technology challenges of managing their dispersed and diverse supplier networks in China, a country rich in opportunity but short on support infrastructure. Sponsored by the Supply-Chain Council and GeorgiaTech’s Executive Masters in International Logistics program, the Supply-Chain Executive Forum attracted senior supply-chain managers from Lowe’s Companies, Sealed Air Corp., BMW Manufacturing Corp., The Walt Disney Co., Motorola Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. , Intel Corp. , and Dell Inc., among others. Read full article (free registration required). … Read more »

This article originally appeared in Managing Automation. Haier Group, China’s leading home-appliance manufacturer, is ready to do away with bar codes. Today, Haier uses bar codes to track items through the production process and enable quality control, according to David Lee, a senior project manager at the company. This requires an employee to manually scan every product. Because of fatigue and operator mistakes, the error rate is between 5% and 10%, he says. In discussing Haier’s shift to RFID (radio frequency identification), Lee cites numerous draws: RFID tags are more durable than bar codes and can nearly eliminate human error from the equation. They also provide a faster method of data capture. Read full article (free registration required). … Read more »