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Saturday, October 1, 2016

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Home/Current Issue > Management >

	R & D Credit Open to More Companies Under Modified IRS Regulations


	By Saqib Dhanani, J. D., Jim Foster, J. D., and Lyndsie Lowry, J. D., Paradigm Partners, Houston, TX On June 3, 2014, the United States Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) published a policy change that drastically improves the landscape of the tax credit for businesses performing research and development (R & D). The change will benefit businesses performing R & D to the tune ...

	Industrial Facilities Turn to HDS Surveys for Retrofits and Expansions


	By Ed Sullivan Manual surveying of industrial sites for retrofits or facility expansion has often required hundreds of hours, sometimes over months, and sometimes involved hazardous locations. When as-built infrastructures were hidden or not precisely detailed in original plans, the resulting survey errors usually ...

	Outsourcing Product Development:What Could Go Wrong?


	By Brian Terhune, Operations Director, Stilwell Baker, Inc., Lake Oswego, OR Outsourcing product development can make any original equipment manufacturer (OEM) nervous. Anyone with experience in the electronics field has seen first-hand what happens when outsourcing goes wrong — higher costs and time-to-market delays reduce sales volume, lower profitability, and shorten ...

	Effective Feedback is not a Sandwich or a Seagull


	By Kevin Higgins, CEO, Fusion Learning Managers rely on team members with improving skills and performance to improve their products and services. But managers who praise their team members without offering suggestions for improvements will not provide the necessary guidance for improvement. And managers who suggest ways for team members ...

	Apple and Oranges: Why B2B Companies Fail


	By Dan Adams Customers can't tell you what they want; that's why Steve Jobs never asked them. It's a popular (if slightly arrogant) attitude among innovators. Perhaps you've heard — or said — something similar at your company. So you assemble a crack team of big brains and task them with thinking up a great ...

	Accelerating the Selective Soldering Learning Curve


	By Alan Cable, President, ACE Production Technologies, Inc. When qualifying a new manufacturing process, it is essential to review the experience and skill levels of key staff members, including factory personnel and the manufacturing engineering team. All processes should deliver repeatable results, which comes from having knowledgeable personnel and advanced ...

	Sizing Up Supply Chain Partnerships


	By John Turner, Sales Program Manager ABX Engineering, Burlingame CA Electronic manufacturing companies faced with production needs often look to electronic manufacturing services (EMS) suppliers for help. But when a company decides to "outsource" their production to one of these EMS partners, is there a way for them to determine the value of their supply chain EMS ...

	The View On Older Workers Is Changing


	By Kevin Ring, Director of Community Growth, Institute of WorkComp Professionals Workers are staying at jobs longer, creating a workforce with an average age that is older than before. Workers are retiring later in life and staying on their jobs longer. This trend, in a workforce with increasingly older workers, is a major concern for those in the health and safety field due to ...

	Apprenticeship and Training Programs Are Critical


	By William Sockman Training is extremely important to the future of manufacturing in the United States, yet in many states it has fallen by the wayside. Training for skilled manufacturing positions has been hit by a perfect storm of budget cuts and the mistaken idea that all young workers should go to college. What ...

	Coming Soon: Manufacturer EPR Requirements


	By Maureen F. Gorsen, Partner, Alston and Bird LLP, Los Angeles, CA Extended producer responsibility (EPR) has been a policy quest for over 20 years, since the concept was first formally introduced in Sweden by Thomas Lindhqvist in 1990. EPR is an environmental protection strategy to reach an environmental objective of a decreased total environmental impact of a product ...

	Online DfE Training and Certification


	By Sally Cole Johnson A new online design-for-environment (DfE) training and certification program may revolutionize the way engineers approach the design of electronics products.

	Equipment Financing: The Manufacturer's Best Option


	By William G. Sutton, CAE, President and CEO, Equipment Leasing and Finance Association, Washington, DC Many businesses give additional consideration to equipment financing to take advantage of special incentives lenders and captive vendors may offer. There is typically a flurry of capital spending as the calendar year winds down, because companies want to get the expenditure squeezed into the expiring ...

Global Growth & Quality Are Keys to Continued Success

By Bryan Gass, Vice President, Techcon Systems, Garden Grove, CA
Techcon Systems has been a leader in fluid dispensing industry for more than 40 years and today is a part of OK International's OEM Division. Focusing on fluid dispensing systems, Techcon's components are used in medical, automotive, telecommunications, aerospace, and industrial applications ...

Coming to America: Siplace Ups the Ante with New Facility

By Mark Ogden, Siplace Americas
At the Siplace Grand Opening in Suwanee, Georgia in June of 2012, several industry experts were invited to participate in panel discussions about the current state and future vision of the SMT industry in the Americas.

	Midsized Manufacturers Major Benefactors of the R&D Tax Credit


	By Saqib Dhanani, Attorney at Law and Rebecca Icenogle, Attorney at Law, both of Paradigm Partners Midsize manufacturers take heart. There's some good news in the tax code with a fat tax credit for R&D. "But we're a manufacturer, not an engineering firm. I'm not sure we really do R&D." "We're not a Fortune 500 company; I'm not sure we have enough R&D to file for a credit." We hear it all the time ...

	Tips for Successful Product Transfers


	By Laurie Hume, Business Unit Manager, Vitronics Soltec Thinking about moving operations from one location to another? Maybe the move is within the same state, within the United States or to and from different countries or continents. Regardless of the geographic locations, transferring products is a major undertaking.

	Lost in the Crowd? Six Ways to Avoid the Commodity Death Spiral


	By Dan Adams, President, Advanced Industrial Marketing, Inc., Cuyahoga Falls, OH Take a good hard look at your new product development strategies. What words come to mind? Do you think fresh, daring, and original? Or do you think, Hmmm, now where have I seen this before? If your widgets look suspiciously like your competitor's widgets, or theirs look like yours, or you have innovative ...

Using Self-Directed Work Teams

By Steve Dicke, VP Sales, Connecticut Spring & Stamping, Farmington, CT
Since 1994, Connecticut Spring & Stamping (CSS) had been using a variety of lean manufacturing techniques to reduce internal waste and costs. The company really expanded its lean manufacturing initiative in 2010, when it opted to use the concept of self-directed work teams (SDWTs) to ...

	How to Develop a Path to Voluntary Procurement Compliance


	By James Thomas, Strategic Marketing Manager, Zycus Recently, I was discussing how important compulsory and/or voluntary stakeholder compliance is to achieving successful procurement technology adoption. After all, compliance bridges the rather large gap between the cost savings that get encoded into strategic supply contracts and spending processes ...

	Management Styles in Bahrain


	By Dr. Suhaila E. AlHashemi (PhD), Department of Management and Marketing, University of Bahrain (suhailaebrahim@yahoo.com), and Dr. Tamer A. Awad (awad_tamer@hotmail.com) Providing the kind of managerial leadership needed for success in the business world is not substantially different in Bahrain than elsewhere in today's global economy. But there are certain areas that call for an extra measure of understanding — zeroing in on the types of leadership skills that ...