Conveyors do more than simply move parts from point A to point B. They serve as the backbone of an assembly line, and, as such, help manufacturers move forward on their road to success.

At many manufacturers, continuous improvement experts are merely fixing problems that should have been avoided in the first place. They are essentially doing process development rework. 

Up until a few decades ago, instrument panels in most vehicles consisted of a smattering of simple analog buttons, dials, gauges, knobs and needles. Today, mechanical speedometers and tachometers have gone the way of bench seats, hood ornaments, hub caps and running boards.

The primary purpose of secondary packaging is to ensure the safety of a product during storage and transportation. The integrity of secondary packaging is particularly important with medical devices.

You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.

Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines. 

Like many long-established car manufacturers, the company that would become Škoda Auto started in the early 1890s by making bicycles. Today, you won’t see velocipedes rolling off of Škoda assembly lines, but you just might see plug-in electric vehicles.

WASHINGTON—Siemens will invest $54 million across several key U.S. manufacturing facilities that serve critical infrastructure markets.

What is the origin of life on Earth? Is there life on other planets? These age-old questions may finally be answered when NASA’s Europa Clipper conducts 44 flybys of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon, beginning in April 2030.

Most manufacturers agree that digital transformation is necessary to remain competitive today and thrive tomorrow. Many large companies have already begun initiatives. But, when asked to quantify the impact of those initiatives on the bottom line, they often come up short.