In March of this year, Vice President Kamala Harris informed Americans of the Biden-Harris administration’s intention to transform public transport across the country by moving toward the world of clean energy. Its mission is to eliminate greenhouse gasses currently produced by fossil fuel combustion engines used in mass and public transport, civil works, and port activities. As the combination of private and public transport contributes twenty-seven percent of the country’s total pollution emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this is a watershed moment for the United States. But where will the money and such vehicles come from?

Firstly, the nationwide mission is made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and according to a White House statement, American Rescue Plan investments will fund it. The gargantuan project is said to firstly benefit children, especially those from disadvantaged communities who have historically been at the rough end of heavy-vehicle pollution.

In addition, the mission promises to become a hold-all for up-skilling existing workers, training new people, improving salaries and wages in related positions, providing more union employment, and improving national health in the United States while turning the nation into a global trailblazer in facing climate change head-on.

There are several moving parts to the overall mission. Firstly, the act significantly raises the financial aid bar with its escalation of $5.5 billion, a ten-fold expansion of the Low- or No-Emission Transit Vehicle Program’s funding of the last half-decade. The Department of Transportation (DOT) is also contributing $1.1 billion for the year, boosted by another $372 million that will go toward the Buses and Bus Facilities Program.

Alongside this funding, another $2.2 billion, contributed by the DOT, will go toward over thirty transit agencies in nearly twenty states as part of the American Rescue Plan. Further financial power will be added to the nation’s coffers with electric mass transit and civil vehicles fabricated on home soil. Other grants will help pay for the conversion across several more sectors.

Things are, at last, looking up for electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers who have been researching, experimenting, building, and rebuilding prototypes for decades. No sooner had the White House released its statement on March 7 than Blue Bird Corporation marked the biggest fleet of electric buses ever requested from its facility in Macon, Georgia. The client was Modesto City Schools from California. Looking to transform its existing fleet into a sleek yellow electric one, the group ordered thirty vehicles to replace 50 percent of its buses. Predictions are that it can now save around a quarter of a million dollars in diesel annually.

Blue Bird Corporation also announced a new re-power program whereby specific models in its low-emissions fuel-combustion engine range of buses can be electrified in collaboration with its partner, Lightning eMotors. However, there are also other important players in the electric bus field. These include GreenPower Motor Company Inc., COBUS Industries GmbH, ElDorado National California Inc., and Nova Bus Corporation.

Schools are not the only organizations looking to increase their zero-emissions performance. Electrifying public transit buses are also on the government’s to-do list. Californian company Proterra stepped up as a major contributor in this area, releasing a brand new ZX5 electric bus transit model in collaboration with Eldorado National California (ENC) that will be in use sometime next year.

With a range of proprietary electrification options, this manufacturer is making the green transition easy for fleets. Its new bus sports a four-speed EV transmission for the best power performance that any of its buses have ever offered. As a result, auto and bus manufacturers are lining up for its technology.

As the country seeks to manufacture better transit vehicles, there are also airplanes and jets to consider. Cape Air, headquartered in Massachusetts is doing its best to join the race to battery-powered aviation. The 400-flights-to-40-cities airline invested in over seventy passenger jets manufactured by Eviation Aircraft of Arlington, Washington, after the news went public as early as 2018.

“Cape Air remains committed to sustainability, growth, and innovation, and our partnership with Eviation allows for these commitments to become a reality,” Linda Markham, its President and Chief Executive Officer told CBS news in April this year. The new nine-seat plane, Eviation Alice, is reported to cover around 500 miles before the battery has to be recharged. Plus, it can fly in the same conditions as piston and turbine planes, according to Eviation. Although Cape Air has not launched the new fleet, its maiden flights are predicted for later this year.

More of our railways are now carrying electric trains. A fleet of 471 cars entered service on the Metro-North Railroad New Haven Line and the CTrail Shore Line East in 2011. Kawasaki is fabricating a further sixty M8 electric multiple-unit trains for Shore Line East. The coaches run as silently as a whisper and save the atmosphere from harmful emissions. Passengers can look forward to improved comfort and guilt-free rides from New Haven to New London with a connection to New York City via Metro-North’s New Haven Line which has been outfitted with electric trains for a decade.

But there is a possibility of a new type of public transport on the horizon with the development of Virgin’s Hyperloop One, currently focused on moving cargo, and SpaceX’s passenger version of the technology. Elon Musk has been promoting his idea of a hyperloop mass transportation system for over a decade. His vision for the future of public transport involves autonomous electric pods travelling at more than 600 miles per hour, turning an ordinary thirty-to-forty-minute train ride into one of less than ten minutes and a three-hour old-fashioned train ride into one of under half an hour.

Musk announced this past April that his tunnel firm, The Boring Company, will start building a test tunnel soon. In 2021, The Boring Company was issued with a permit to turn its Vegas Loop system into almost thirty miles with over forty-nine stations taking passengers along the Las Vegas Strip and beyond as far as McCarran International Airport.

As manufacturing returns to the United States and more exciting developments are underway, the drive for security could mean that the minerals needed for battery fabrication could soon be sourced locally. In light of this, it will be interesting to follow how supply chains are designed to ensure absolute supply safety over the next decade or so.

While there are still areas that need to be figured out across several fields, especially in terms of scalability, what is certain is that whether we travel by trains, boats, or planes, the means of powering and manufacturing mass transit is evolving rapidly.

The post Investment and Innovation<p class="company">The Manufacture of Mass Transit</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

It all begins with the company’s underlying value system. When asked why Bell and Howell is driven to support food banks, he replies, “I believe that question can be answered by our company philosophy of ‘Doing the Right Thing.’ Doing the right thing is our promise to each other as part of the Bell and Howell family. If we take care of each other, we take care of our customers, take care of the company and our community, we will all be successful.”

Food insecurity is a particularly salient issue in our pandemic world. “The arrival of COVID-19 impacted many parts of the economy,” Hermanowski says. “Unemployment skyrocketed, and food insecurity increased dramatically. Headline news across the country showed videos of hundreds of vehicles lined up to receive boxes of food put together by wonderful teams of volunteers. Adding more pain to the picture, food prices are skyrocketing, items are scarce, and more people are negatively impacted. Many pockets of the population—our neighbors—struggle and juggle the cost of medicine, food, and fuel each day.

“COVID-19 also disproportionately impacted some people at higher risk of severe illness. This includes older adults (65 years and older) and people of any age with serious underlying medical conditions. However, volunteer ranks are heavily weighted toward older adults, many of which have stepped away from volunteering to protect themselves and their families from a potentially devastating infection. In other situations, the concern was too great and the burden too much to bear that organizations took preventive measures and asked at-risk volunteers to stay away.”

There is a clear need for a more flexible system in which people can access food banks on their schedule, without having to rely on volunteers. “The services our neighbors depend upon for nutritious food face a bleak future unless there is change,” Hermanowski says. Food assistance programs “are left understaffed yet need to service an increasing population. Consequently, the open hours available at food access locations have been reduced to the level where there is just no possible way for our neighbors to pick up the food they need. In some communities, it is down to just two hours each week, and unfortunately, those two hours are at a time when many recipients just cannot be there.”

Consumers are not the only ones reeling from the pandemic landscape. COVID-19 has accelerated new grocery trends that the industry must accommodate with little time to adjust. “COVID-19 has also had a dramatic impact on our partners in the grocery space,” he says.

“Online purchasing of groceries has exploded from a small percentage of the total spending pre-COVID to over 10 percent, or $100 billion, in 2021. That trend has not abated with forecast [compound annual growth rate] of 18.1 percent over the next few years reaching $300 billion. Grocers are building the next generation infrastructure to support this tremendous growth with much of it focused on digital and online shopping. Digital investments include better websites optimized for mobile users, digital coupons, digital recipes and the ability to allow consumers to ‘opt in’ so the store can track their arrival using their mobile phone so their order is ready when they arrive.”

Grocery stores must navigate this rapidly evolving landscape while simultaneously dealing with a worker shortage—not unlike the challenge facing food banks. “Grocers also face similar challenges finding people,” Hermanowski says. “They do not rely on volunteers but they, too, find it challenging to hire enough labor to keep grocery stores and their online systems running. However, they have access to technology that helps them overcome these challenges,” he shares.

“One extremely helpful solution employed is known as ‘automated pickup’ technology. Automated pickup technology is equipment that holds a customer’s order for them until they arrive to pick it up. The systems maintain proper temperatures for groceries and do not require a store employee to be there to deliver the order. As a result, consumers are able to pick up their groceries at their convenience even if the store is closed,” Hermanowski explains.

“Like many new technologies, automated pickup systems create new paradigms never considered before. Consider the automated teller machine or ATM. When it first appeared, no one ever thought it would be possible to obtain cash from their bank account anytime day or night. Automated grocery pickup systems are the new ATMs for food.

“The trends are surprisingly clear,” he continues. “The grocery ecosystem is quickly moving in a digital direction where access to computers, mobile phones and the Internet are becoming the minimum requirement to participate. When Amazon first arrived, it offered vast quantities of products, often priced lower online than locally. Those with access to Amazon’s website benefited; those without, paid more. As grocery moves to the digital domain, the same is expected to happen, and the beginnings of that are visible today with many grocers offering ‘digital only’ deals.

“Yet, studies continue to show that households with incomes below $30,000 per year are significantly less likely to have access to broadband services, a computer or a smartphone. Although smartphone availability and use is higher than for a computer, there are many cases where the mobile number changes over time because the user is unable to pay for mobile service for a given month. Furthermore, the keys to grocery’s digital kingdom revolve around a user account, which requires an email address or a mobile phone number, and in many cases, both—something not often available to those suffering from food insecurity. If something is not done promptly, the new digital ecosystem being built by grocers will continue down a path that leaves our neighbors with food insecurity behind.”

Bell and Howell’s ability to leverage a grocer’s own tools can mitigate this digital divide. “Automated grocery pickup systems and the ecosystems to support them are being rolled out by grocers across the United States, making them readily available and produced in economical volumes,” he says.

“Some grocers can and do place the machines in food deserts, supporting communities that would otherwise have no access to a full assortment of healthy foods. Most importantly, deployments are giving communities access to that food at a time and location convenient for them.

“This same technology can be readily deployed to address food insecurity and vendors such as us have partnered with food access programs and others to create features specifically designed to address the needs of our neighbors, for example, the ability to access the technology even without a computer or mobile phone. Innovations like these not only improve food access but level the playing field and reduce the digital divide.”

Typically, automated grocery pickup systems come in two forms, depending on the volume and how often they are used. Grocery ‘PODs’ address high volumes of groceries, while grocery smart lockers, like Bell and Howell’s QuickCollect GL address low to moderate volumes of groceries. Both options are popular with food banks and grocery stores around the country because they provide secure, temperature-controlled environments to safely store groceries until the consumer can collect them.

The Bell and Howell team believes that the use of automated technology will continue to increase in the future. “Non-profit organizations such as Feeding America are addressing hunger across America,” Hermanowski says. “They are expert at acquiring and moving large quantities of food across the nation, serving millions of our neighbors just like any leading grocer, except it is a non-profit organization. We see the same types of technology used by large corporations and grocers to manage customer interactions, improve supply chain efficiency, and run complex organizations making its way into the non-profits that support food access programs.”

Having this technology utilized for non-profit applications to reduce food insecurity across America is certainly welcome news and evidence that Bell and Howell’s ‘Doing the Right Thing’ mentality is at work throughout the nation to create positive, lasting change.

The post Doing the Right Thing<p class="company">Bell and Howell</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Designed to provide minimally invasive therapy and to improve productivity, connectivity, and intelligence in the operating room, Robotic Magnetic Navigation (RMN), developed by Stereotaxis, aims to increase surgical precision and safety. To date, more than 140,000 patients have received treatment worldwide via the company’s RMN technology which is changing the face of minimally invasive procedures. The company launched the most recent advancements of its technology with its Genesis RMN system in 2020.

“We’re focused on improving surgery with robotic precision and safety,” says CEO David Fischel. “If you think about surgery from a very broad perspective, it can be categorized into three main categories: open surgery, laparoscopic surgery and endovascular surgery. Endovascular is a large class where you use catheters in the blood vessels of a patient to deliver therapy or do diagnosis in a minimally invasive fashion.”

The challenge with that type of surgery is that while a physician is holding a long, flexible tube or catheter in the body at one end of the tube, the procedure is actually executed at the other end, two or three feet away, which can result in translational mistakes. With Genesis, there is no handheld manipulation; instead highly precise external magnets on robotic arms are used for precise positioning of the catheter. The catheter can be designed with soft plastic to lessen the possibility of heart injury.

“What Stereotaxis did was transform endovascular surgery by using very precisely applied magnetic fields to the tip of a catheter operated from a computer control system, giving physicians direct control of the tip of the catheter,” explains Fischel. “If you have direct control of the tip where the action takes place, you can have millimeter precision, perfect stability, and can move in ways that otherwise would be impossible.”

Because of the delicate anatomy in question, endovascular surgery is challenging, and the Genesis RMN system provides the advantages of robotic safety and precision to cardiac ablation, a minimally invasive treatment for arrhythmias. Arrhythmias, which are abnormal cardiac rhythms caused by the heart beating too rapidly, too slowly, or in an erratic manner, affect tens of millions of people worldwide. Untreated arrhythmias can dramatically raise the risk of abrupt cardiac arrest, heart failure, and stroke.

Doctors must carefully maneuver a catheter through sensitive and vital locations in order to perform cardiac ablation, which involves destroying small patches of tissue to correct arrhythmia. Clinical data using Stereotaxis robotic technology has demonstrated 72 percent fewer medical complications during surgery, six to eight percent improved efficacy, and 35 percent reduced radiation exposure to patients, says Fischel.

The Genesis system can deliver superior ablation because of increased stability and precision in reaching places otherwise impossible. This is in addition to the softer plastic, which buckles rather than pushing through tissue, allowing physicians to concentrate on the therapeutic aspects of the surgery. With Genesis, the company has entirely reinvented the magnets and how they are used, giving patients, doctors, and hospitals distinct advantages in a smaller, lighter, and faster tool. The magnets are held on flexible and rugged robotic arms, greatly increasing the potential range of motion of the system, allowing for wider X-ray angulation and serving as a platform for future innovation.

The entire system is significantly smaller and designed to improve the patient experience while on the operating table, not only providing physicians and nurses with greater access to the patient during the procedure, but increasing space in the labs for an enhanced work environment.

“Twenty years ago, if we would have looked at the initial researchers that were trying to develop the technology and had to assign a probability of success, it probably would have been a very low probability,” says Fischel. “But they ended up making it work and… turned it into reality.”

Now a pioneer and global leader of the reality of robotics in this industry, Stereotaxis is a high-end company but still a “very early player in transforming this kind of surgery. We don’t have any material robotic competitor, but obviously the vast majority of procedures are still done by hand while standing at the patient’s bedside,” explains Fischel.

The first two Genesis units were installed in Arizona and Finland in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, after receiving FDA approval, he adds, and in addition to the RMN unit’s present installed base, seven robots are soon to be installed internationally.

“In broad strokes, we’re spending over 30 percent of our revenue on research and development to advance robotics technology,” says Fischel. “Every time we improve our medical device, with every innovation, we improve patient care and experience during the surgery—but beyond that, we want to make robotics more accessible and affordable at the hospitals. I think it’s so important to improve patient safety in a very meaningful way that allows patients a treatment option who otherwise didn’t have one,” says Fischel.

For hospitals, pricing and accessibility are frequent obstacles. To combat that, Stereotaxis has been developing robots that are more closely integrated with X-ray equipment and are smaller, lighter, and more maneuverable.

One of the challenges for accessibility and affordability is that a robot is a part of a broader construction process that needs to be installed in an operating room lab. This involves an architectural plan and contractors, a real process and not something that can simply deploy into a lab without pre-work. While the Genesis system itself has reduced the size and weight of a robot by approximately 50 percent, making it easier to install in hospitals, Stereotaxis has been working on a next generation system that will be more easily deployable to any hospital, an innovation expected to have a real impact in the next couple of years.

Other aspects of new product innovations include working on a series of interventional tools—endovascular devices that would allow a robot to be used for a broader range of procedures. Beyond treating heart arrhythmias, the system could also be used to treat stroke, peripheral arterial disease, coronary diseases, and other vascular diseases.

The company’s plans for future growth in many ways tie very closely into its new product innovation. This includes its current focus market of electrophysiology—the branch of medicine dealing with the electrical circuitry of the heart—and the gradual taking of additional share in that marketplace.

“While we’re currently less than a one percent player and the standard of care is to do things with hand-held catheters, I think the clinical data for robotics in cardiac ablation procedures to treat heart arrhythmia is very, very positive,” says Fischel. “We have data from hundreds of publications by now and over 140,000 patients have been treated with our technology in that field.”

The overarching question is, how does Stereotaxis transform and improve a field, increasing access to care by introducing advanced robotic technology to a field that’s been doing things in a handheld manner for more than 30 years? Changing medicine is a very slow and gradual process, shares Fischel. “One of our big growth opportunities involves becoming a standard of care in electrophysiology in treating arrhythmias, and that’s a big focus,” he says. “We do a range of things to try to impact that. One is improving the technology and improving product offering, and another is training physicians and training fellows.”

In fact, Stereotaxis has implemented systems at several university hospitals where physicians are being trained in the field of electrophysiology, which is a subset of cardiology focused on these procedures, while also receiving training on the company’s system.

“There’s kind of a multi-pronged effort to grow our share in electrophysiology,” Fischel says. “A second big pillar for how to grow is making robotics much more accessible and affordable, because then you have a broader set of hospitals that can actually work with [us] and can adopt some of the innovations we’re developing.”

A third element is expansion into new clinical applications that increases the company’s target market, allowing the technology to be used more broadly in endovascular surgery. This involves developing the right tools to be used alongside the robot that go in the body and the right interventional devices that allow the ability to address many more clinical specialties.

The fourth pillar, Fischel says, is from a geographic perspective. Stereotaxis has largely been focused on the United States and Europe, where more than 90 percent of its install base exists. However, last year the company entered into a collaboration with China’s leading cardiovascular medical device company to integrate robotics more fully into the Chinese market.

Although still a small company overall, Stereotaxis is the only one focused on advanced robotics in this field, he adds.

“The reason that a medical device company exists is because there are unmet medical needs in the world,” says Fischel. “If we think about ourselves as ultimately patients, every one of us at some point will have some medical issues or maladies. It’s an amazing field to work in and to see how much progress has been made, but at the same time, it is generally very painful being a patient. There’s a lot of work to do as a society to improve that.”

The post The Heart of the Matter: Striving for Safer Surgery<p class="company">Stereotaxis</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Home to countless skilled tradespeople, many of them European immigrants, ITL became a sort of incubator where generations of workers apprenticed, honed their craft, and moved on.

“There was generation one, two, three, and four; my dad was generation two,” says Jonathon Azzopardi of his father, who, with three partners, left ITL and started Laval Tool and Mould in 1975.

“It was almost a rite of passage that ITL would spin off very competent entrepreneurs in this space, and they seemed to go in batches,” Azzopardi says. Now, almost 50 years later, the team at Laval still designs and builds complex compression moulds for its many customers.

Laval Tool and Mould is a Controlled Goods Program (CGP) compliant manufacturer and works for clients across North America in government, military, recreational, and specialty vehicles, heavy trucks, and household items.

The size of its products varies considerably. At the big end, some of the largest items Laval makes are one-piece tools, weighing about 200,000 pounds, for enormous air fairings fitted to trucks. At the opposite end, Laval builds moulds for simple plaques measuring about 12 inches by 12 inches and even smaller parts, the size of a potato chip, which go inside the plaque.

“We only focus on composites,” says Azzopardi. “We do only the compression process. We don’t actively go after the injection process.”

Beginning his involvement in the family business while still a child, Jonathon Azzopardi helped clean the company’s bathrooms. With the start of his employment proper, he gained experience in different divisions within Laval. The youngest of the Azzopardi boys, he worked for all his older siblings at some point, getting to know the industry firsthand.

After Larry passed away in 2009, the company underwent some reorganization for about a year, and Jonathon assumed the role of chief executive officer and president in late 2010. Today, under Azzopardi’s leadership, Laval Tool and Mould is evolving and diversifying its sectors.

When Laval opened, it was a regular mould shop. Through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, the mould industry was highly lucrative until the recessions of the late ‘90s and early 2000s kicked in.

Global supply chains were affected, and Laval had to compete with lower-cost countries, primarily China, which made the going hard. Faced with a challenging marketplace and global downturn, the company implemented drastic changes in 2006.

These included pulling away from automotive and diversifying its client base, sectors, processes, and materials, adding greater value to its products across the board. The result was a new golden age.

About 20 years ago, the company moved away from commoditized tooling. “How we define commoditizing is when somebody can put you in a box and define you easily. We did everything we could so that you couldn’t put us in a box, which means we do all the things that nobody else wants to do,” says Azzopardi. “We take a lot of risks. And by assuming a lot of risks, we are de-risking the process for our clients.”

Although de-risking can be perilous, the people at Laval have become masters at the process, whereas others, such as manufacturers in China, don’t want to assume any risk, other than repeat the manufacturing process thousands and thousands of times, which is how they make their money.

“We’ve taken a totally different approach: we are going to do the things nobody else wants to do. We’ll do them in low-volume scenarios, high-volume scenarios, and scenarios that haven’t even been defined. That’s the space we live in,” says Azzopardi. “And that includes prototyping.”

De-commoditizing tooling and being parts-responsible means Laval takes on potential issues on behalf of customers, and they’re especially proud of this. “We continue to add more services to the company that the clients would typically be responsible for, to the point where we’re actually as good at what we do as the client we’re making the parts for,” says Azzopardi.

“If you think about tooling as being the centre hub of what it takes to make a part, tooling is just the centre. There’s a lot of stuff on the front end—which is design and simulation—and there’s a lot of stuff that comes after the tool is made at the back end, which is making the parts and prototyping them for sampling, and doing one-offs.

“So we have opened up our value-added to all of those operations at the same time under one roof. That’s what we’ve been doing since 2000.”

As well as long-time sectors like government household items and heavy trucks, Laval is active in areas such as construction materials, industrial products, and Internet and IT.

Due to the nature of its business, the company has a reputation for de-risking composite parts for virtually every industry, including agriculture and the cannabis sector. “When we de-commoditized tooling and opened up that we are parts-responsible, our opportunities greatly increased,” says Azzopardi.

One of the company’s most gutsy, against-the-tide initiatives came when Laval stopped building injection moulds. Many others in the sector were stunned by the move, since injection accounts for some 98 percent of the industry, with Laval investing in and concentrating on the remaining two percent.

“We are not just a moulding company, we’re a tooling company who also has moulding,” explains Azzopardi, “and they are both heavily invested industries. You have to invest so much to be competitive in these industries that most people wouldn’t want to take on both of these animals at the same time. We’re doing it every day because we have to.”

By being parts-responsible, not tool-responsible, Laval has the same capabilities as its clients—since it has to be able to make the parts they would make—but also has other services that clients do not have, namely the tooling aspect. “And that’s a very complicated monster to manage,” says Azzopardi.

Along with being a highly experienced, parts-responsible and family-owned business, Laval Tool and Mould brings many other benefits to its customers. On the border between Canada and the United States means Laval is readily accessible and accountable, compared to offshore companies. This is newly evident as the world comes out of COVID-19, which saw supply chains crumble and transportation of goods slow to a trickle.

“We live in the world of uncertainty,” says Azzopardi. “Manufacturing today is changing all the time. Lead times are shorter, the supply chain is unstable—with all the risks associated with being in business now, and manufacturing specifically—and you take on even more risk when your partner is on the other side of the ocean. COVID really brought to light the risk of doing business with somebody who’s not in a place that we can just get in the car and drive to.”

Much like Laval’s de-risking processes for its clients, it also helps them by being a Made in Canada business, and providing stability and accountability.

Canadian and American suppliers are generally extremely stable, and Laval brings stability to a very unstable space and gets the job done right the first time. This even extends to the company purchasing its own trucks after border shut-downs to ensure transportation of materials and products, and diversifying its supply chain. Before the pandemic, Laval bought steel from two countries; today it buys from five countries.

As it looks forward to growth in Canada and the U.S., the future of Laval is assured. Although he’s only in his forties, Azzopardi hopes the family business will continue with the next generation.

“I’ve got a son who’s smarter than I am,” he says, with a father’s pride. “I believe that one day he will be someone more amazing than I could ever be, and if that leads him here, I’d be happy to have him on the team. He’d be a great addition.”

The post Thinking and Working Outside the Box<p class="company">Laval Tool and Mould Ltd.</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

The first web version of TraceParts’ CAD catalog line was launched in July 2001. Since then, the company has accrued almost five million registered users worldwide, all of whom benefit from a data pool containing over 1,500 catalogs of industrial components. The business also features catalogs in over sixty native and digital formats in over twenty languages. Managing Director Gabriel Guigue describes the digital formats as part of the company’s digital continuity, in that each part in the database contains product metadata which can be used to extract and order parts.

The TraceParts platform provides a solution referred to internally as “completing the digital thread,” which ensures that a visitor to the website can access a company name, part number, and build material in each CAD file, to enable designers and engineers to download and locate parts globally and incorporate these parts into designs.

TraceParts pays close attention to two target customer groups in its day-to-day operations, according to company President Rob Zesch. The first group uses its product catalog services. Generally, these clients are industrial manufacturers that make mechanical and electromechanical products specified in the context of other components. The company’s catalog services provide world-leading solutions to allow these manufacturers to include 3D product catalogs on their own websites and on TraceParts.com and the TraceParts publishing network of over forty websites.

These solutions in turn provide sales leads for manufacturers that result in increased sales, as well as savings of time and money as automating the access to information eliminates the need for research and delivery through multiple channels.

The second customer group referred to by Zesch has five distinct categories: parts manufacturers, 3D printing / rapid prototyping / 3D scanning, computer hardware vendors, parts distributors, and design software vendors. To these groups, TraceParts provides digital marketing services by allowing them to advertise directly to website subscribers through banner advertising, email campaigns, newsletters, and more. This helps these customers reach their customers in a targeted manner, thereby increasing sales and company and brand awareness.

Guigue is quick to extol the advantages of digital marketing and explain why a company like TraceParts has embraced it to the degree that it has. Firstly, digital marketing simplifies the process of reaching potential customers, as it is generally more efficient and cost-effective to reach customers more precisely, whereas digital marketing can.

TraceParts has developed an interactive segmentation engine that allows digital marketing experts to work in collaboration with clients, to use the registration profiles and behavioral activity of active users to target customer groups by geography, type of industry of the client, or departments. This represents a unique solution to precisely target clients across all industries.

Guigue mentions that, with digital campaigns, one can measure and track a return on investment in real time, allowing experimentation with different messages and target groups without the need for high-cost campaigns.

The advantages of digital marketing have served the company well for the past two decades, with July 2021 representing the twentieth anniversary of the TraceParts web application. Across twenty years, the website has seen 63 million page views annually, consisting of 9.7 million visits with 3.7 million unique visitors to the site and nearly five million registered designers and engineers.

Guigue touts the company’s impressive international customer growth as well, with 45 percent of the business being done outside of the European Union domestic market. In North America, business growth has been significant over the past couple of years especially, with over one hundred catalog customers doing business across the continent. The company expects this number to double within the next two years.

Guigue explains that the DNA of the business lies in the openness of its data, in both input and output. The TraceParts smart publishing platform can connect to product information management and enterprise resource planning systems to update and maintain catalogs without human interaction.

Through the platform, customers control what, when, and how they publish on the TraceParts platform, along with a fully documented interface to index and syndicate catalog data without redirection to the TraceParts website. Essentially, users can create their own experience through mobile and web applications while using the information in the TraceParts data vault.

The company’s successes have meant that it continues to deal with rapid growth and massive customer demand. Zesch admits that it is a lot of work; in the past three years, the company has added over one hundred catalogs in the U.S. alone, with teams working every day to build content. Over thirty new team members have been brought on for this task since 2018.

A combination of data supply and demand has made big data expertise and artificial intelligence a challenge. These days, the market is even more dynamic than it was pre-pandemic, which is due, in part, to trade fairs being cancelled since 2020. “The demand for TraceParts has never been so strong,” Guigue adds. In the future, changes to the processes will be necessary to keep up.

The company will be accelerating its investment in research and development to keep up with the demands of its customers and will be boosting its sales and marketing investment considerably. TraceParts will be looking to apply marketing to parts manufacturers and to any advertisers that want to reach its substantial vertical audience.

The company requires an experienced sales team who are comfortable with building relationships and engagement more closely than possible through a simple call center. Guigue cites current market research which details that fewer than twenty percent of worldwide parts vendors already offer self-service mechanisms for sharing CAD models.

TraceParts’ digital marketing solutions, including its catalog and lead generation solutions, are targeting the remaining eighty percent of that market, and with a strong track record of over twenty-five years of expertise in that business, Guigue, Zesch, and the TraceParts team feel that the company’s place in the market is secure.

The post Celebrating Three Decades of Best-In-Class 3D Product Data<p class="company">TraceParts </p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

The single biggest change since the company was profiled by Manufacturing in Focus in May 2019 comes in the form of an acquisition. In early 2021, JN White purchased ECI Screenprint which was a direct competitor that screenprints flexible circuits and graphic overlays. Based in Watertown, Connecticut, it has been rebranded as ECI Technologies, a JN White company.

“It’s a company that does essentially the same thing we do. Without question, that’s the biggest thing that’s gone on since 2019,” says Vice President of Sales Ken Boss.

The company serves the industrial electronics, agricultural, medical device, consumer appliance, defense, and automotive sectors. “We’re really positioning ourselves as the manufacturing experts for medical device manufacturing and department of defense and related companies, both OEMs and first-tier suppliers,” notes President Jason Aymerich.

To this end, JN White has ISO 9001:2015 certification for manufacturing and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) certification that is required for doing business in the U.S. defense / military sector.

The company is also compliant with Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) as well. These European manufacturing standards limit the use of heavy metals and toxic substances during production.

“We are also pursuing our NIST 800-171 and CMMC Level 2 compliance, which is very important for Department of Defense customers,” he adds. CMMC—Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification—as developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, contains different levels of compliance.

JN White kept extremely busy fulfilling orders for medical device manufacturers during the worst of the COVID crisis. The firm also produced its own line of face shields, a much-in-demand bit of personal protective equipment.

Its non-COVID medical work centers on interface assemblies and labeling. For defense-related products, the company provides manufacturers with keypads, user interface panels, and extreme environment / crucial-use labels. It also creates custom membrane switches for the industrial electronics, consumer appliance, agricultural, and automotive sectors.

“Everything we produce is custom. Ninety-five percent of what we manufacture is for an OEM. It could be as simple on buying a label stock from a company like 3M, printing it, cutting it, and turning it into a finished product for a customer,” says Boss. “We also get into more complex user interfaces. We might be purchasing printed circuit boards to our customer’s specs, manufacturing the graphic overlay, then assembling and testing [everything] as part of our manufacturing process.”

Services are performed in-house, although “Depending on the complexity, we may subcontract,” as needed, he continues, adding that at present, design engineering for manufacturing is the service that brings in the most revenue.

The company’s excellent reputation centers on three main factors: “our technical abilities, impeccable quality, and excellent customer relations,” says Aymerich. “Once our customers are onboard, we have a near frictionless experience in the way we interact which makes the entire process of working with JN White streamlined and easy to manage,” he adds.

This frictionless experience stems in part from JN White’s commitment to lean initiatives. Several company executives have engineering degrees, or Six Sigma designations such as black and green belts, while lean training is emphasized for all staff. While efficiency is important, product innovation remains top-of-mind as well.

Including ECI, the company now employs roughly 123 people, up from approximately 115 this time last year, says Aymerich. When hiring new staff, applicants with “deep industry knowledge,” a good work ethic and connections are preferred. Patience is also required, given “The sales cycle in our industry is particularly long,” he says. “We are actively pursuing more technologically complex projects. By virtue of that fact, the development cycle on the customer side is longer. Some of our larger programs have been in development for two or three years.”

Clearly, JN White is doing something right. The company won the Wyoming County 2021 ‘Large Business of the Year Award,’ given by the Wyoming County Chamber of Commerce and Tourism. That same year, it was a finalist for the ‘Manufacturing Innovation Award’ presented by the Rochester Business Journal. In 2022, JN White received a Greater Rochester Quality Council (GRQC) silver award as well as Aymerich being included on the Rochester Business Journal’s ‘Power 50 in Technology’ list.

The company has come a very long way over the decades. It was founded in 1960 by James Neel White (J.N.), an Air Force veteran who served with distinction as a fighter pilot in World War Two. Originally called J.N. White Designs and based out of the founder’s home, the company had a much narrower focus in its early days. “At our onset, we were screen printers to the core, mostly doing labeling,” recalls Boss.

Gradually, the company added new services and new markets. Growth came about through both expansion and acquisitions. Since the early 1990s, it has purchased four businesses, including a company in New York State and two divisions of the same firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ECI is the latest purchase. The company name was changed to JN White in 2016.

James White’s son, Randy White, is currently President and Chief Executive Officer. In 2019, Randy White hired Aymerich because he possessed experience in rapidly-growing companies. To complement Aymerich’s skill in driving growth, the company puts a great deal of energy and effort into marketing.

“For a company our size, we have an aggressive marketing plan,” states Boss. Internet marketing includes “everything from social media—LinkedIn, Facebook—to Google searches. Our marketing presence is really top-tier for our industry, even up against some of our largest competitors. We have a fully-established marketing department, marketing program, and marketing budget, and a lot of—if not the majority of our new prospects and leads right now—are coming in through those marketing efforts.”

The company also routinely attends trade shows and maintains a lively online presence with a detailed website and blog. The blog contains a regular ‘Ask Ken’ column in which Boss answers industry-related questions on topics such as backlighting, graphic overlays, labels, and membrane switches.

While they can’t speak to specific plans right now for further corporate purchases, the company’s management and ownership remain open to the idea.

“We are looking at other acquisitions and also licensing technology and industry-specific Intellectual Property. We’re looking at acquisitions both in our field and in adjacent technologies, like [printed circuit board] manufacturing, maybe wire harnesses—things that our products would be incorporated into. We are finalizing a patent and intellectual property agreement for a very novel backlighting technology, and we believe that will help open the field for additional growth for JN White,” Aymerich states.

The company wants to continue innovating and enhancing existing products and services, while also developing new wares.

“I think, ultimately, we would like to identify a product somewhere in the wearable medical device arena that we would manufacture and market as our own JN White product, but that’s yet to be determined. I believe it will absolutely be somewhere in the field of printed and flexible electronics,” says Boss.

For all that, there have been a few bumps on the road as of late. COVID might have driven product development and sales, but the pandemic has also wreaked havoc on global supply chains. Supply issues represent the biggest challenge facing the company at present. “The more we get into electronics, the more supply chain becomes a concern, specifically, the availability of electronic components that go into some of the custom-printed circuit boards,” he admits.

Supply chain delays and disruptions have affected business in another way too. Faced with their own supply chain challenges, original equipment manufacturers are taking longer to build products or making fewer of them which can, in turn, mean less business for JN White.

“If we’re doing the printed instrumentation cluster in an automobile and they’re building less automobiles because they can’t get computer chips, then they don’t need our product either,” explains Boss.

These issues might cause headaches but are not likely to interfere with the company’s overall momentum. Company leaders offer an optimistic forecast, centered on continued growth.

“I see JN White in five years being roughly double the revenue we are currently and continuing to expand our capabilities to include more and more complex products. We want to own the top half-inch of our customer’s product. Instead of just doing overlays and membrane switches, we’re doing [printed circuit boards] board and wire harness or flexible circuits that are associated with that and continuing to add more value to our customers,” states Aymerich.

The post New Products and New Acquisition Equals Big Growth<p class="company">JN White</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

As a disruptor in the AM space, Elementum 3D has successfully taken previously unprintable materials and made them printable, which has rapidly accelerated the advancement of AM processes and metal 3D printing, as well as the performance of the products being manufactured.

A new approach to a new technology

Through the research and development efforts of its team of highly trained materials science and metallurgy experts, Elementum 3D established a way to overcome the two fundamental challenges of 3D printing: the need for a broader range of materials; and the need for improved processes in which these materials can be utilized.

In order to expand the material repertoire available to AM, Elementum 3D introduced a revolutionary approach for a relatively new technology: its proprietary patented reactive additive manufacturing (RAM) process.

“The RAM process gives us additional freedom to make unprintable materials printable. So, because we have this technology, it means we can take a standard off-the-shelf printer and do things people said aren’t possible, like printing high-strength aluminums,” explains President and Founder Dr. Jacob Nuechterlein.

By forming sub-micron ceramic reinforcement phases within production quality alloy powders, Elementum 3D produces printable, high-performance metal matrix composites that, in turn, have established the company as a leader in metal alloy AM, powder research, material and print process development, and scaled production.

Elementum 3D’s metal, ceramic and composite powders have distinctive properties (ideal particle size, shape, density and composition) that meet precise tolerances for demanding applications. Products manufactured with AM are proven to have enhanced strength, conductivity, ductility, low magnetic permeability, durability, hardness, stability, and heat resistance.

“From the beginning, we were looking at offering materials you can find in a machine shop but for metal 3D printing, so you could take advantage of metal 3D printing and still not compromise the materials,” shares Dr. Nuechterlein of the motivation to develop the next-generation materials that would enable AM in ways never before seen.

From a material library standpoint, Elementum 3D offers both RAM and non-RAM materials, but its RAM library is impressive, now boasting six varieties of aluminum and three nickel alloys, with properties surpassing the material’s non-AM equivalent.

More recently, Elementum 3D received a Direct to Phase II SBIR contract from DARPA to develop a process by which pure rhenium can be used to fabricate complex components. Traditionally difficult to process as a refractory metal, rhenium has the second highest melting point of all metal elements, making it highly attractive for very high-temperature applications such as rocket propulsion components.

A sound business case for additive manufacturing

Thanks to advancements made by Elementum 3D, metals like aluminum can now be printed with faster production speeds at reduced equipment costs, making AM and metal 3D printing competitive with traditional manufacturing processes on price and functionality.

Despite the advantages of Elementum 3D’s next-generation materials, introducing new materials and technologies to any industry can be a hard sell. This is especially true of the manufacturers in the mission-critical industries that Elementum 3D supports, such as aerospace, energy, healthcare and defense. Elementum 3D found early success in rocket engines, high-end automotive parts like engine components for F1, and cooling components for servers, but from a sales standpoint there were two major challenges: long sales cycles; and the need to prove out the performance of the materials in a significant way.

To demonstrate the value Elementum 3D offered, Dr. Nuechterlein and his team needed to, as he says, “showcase something wildly different—rather than it being ten percent better, as I’ve seen in other industries, where you adapt it and move on. This had to be wildly better for anyone to consider taking on a new material or a new project using our materials in the manufacturing process,” which they did.

Education is key

To be recognized by manufacturers in the market, Elementum 3D has not only had to develop impressive materials and print processes that have changed the state of AM; the company also had to take on the role of educator.

As Dr. Nuechterlein recalls, “There was a lot of education at the beginning just about 3D printing and metal 3D printing in particular, and then an additional step to teach them about our materials and what makes our materials different.”

Elementum 3D educates manufacturers on where and where not to use AM, helping them to understand the business cases and the opportunities to do so and working with them to ensure optimal results. There are also efforts underway to ensure AM is recognized by standards bodies and included in their regulations. Elementum 3D has worked with F1 to be included in their rule book and continues to identify opportunities to advance AM (and its materials) in this regard.

The philosophy driving success

Beyond the materials and processes, which are revolutionary in their own right, one of Elementum 3D’s greatest strengths has to be the ability to strike a balance between the dichotomy that is the builder / protector mentality.

“The builder mindset and the protector mindset: both are necessary for human advancement and for things to go well and for things to go right. When you can address the concerns of the protector and build on the dreams of the builder, I think that’s why we’ve gotten traction in the market like we have,” says Dr. Nuechterlein.

While Elementum 3D is a materials company, it goes beyond the development and supply of materials. “We hand you the whole process and then help you with that process for your particular application and walk you through it. That’s something that doesn’t exist elsewhere,” Dr. Nuechterlein notes.

The company’s mission to “enhance lives by developing groundbreaking high-performance 3D printing materials and technology that can turn innovative concepts into reality” is an honorable one and one it continues to achieve as it forges ahead.

With a continued focus on material development and the drive to advance the AM sector as a whole, Elementum 3D and its impact will endure, pushing the limits of what is possible in AM and metal 3D printing for the betterment of the manufacturers who utilize the materials and the end users who rely on the parts and components across diverse industry applications.

The post Pushing the Limits of Additive Manufacturing<p class="company">Elementum 3D</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.

Sound far-fetched? Maybe not, if you are driving around in 2050. All those details about your drive are conceptualized through a collaboration between Auto Trader and Futurologist Tom Cheesewright, based on the rate of technology development, market trends and consumer demand.

Even the magical-sounding option to make your car bubble gum-pink is theoretically possible through a color changing e-ink paint which is millions of micro capsules filled with paint and negatively charged white pigments and positively charged black pigments that react when the electrical field is changed.

BMW recently showed off its iX concept car complete with stripes that change from white to gray to black across the car.

All of this sounds amazing, but we are just starting out on the road toward all these changes. By taking a closer look at where we are now, we may get a better picture of what cars may look like in the future – and what it means for manufacturers.

Let’s start with what will likely be the heart of most cars of the future, the battery. It’s no secret that the auto industry is moving toward electric vehicles (EVs). But while progress is being made, there are still many things that need to be improved to get to that futuristic picture of driving on autopilot.

In the 2021 Electric Vehicle Experience Ownership study by J.D. Power about EVs, the researchers confirmed that it was range that made the greatest difference in overall electric vehicle satisfaction among consumers. Commonly known as “range anxiety,” people want to feel sure that they are going to reach their destination without running out of charge.

And since electric vehicles have been built, which is longer than you may think, the real trick is making batteries that are able to hold more charge while taking up less room under the hood. Originally, EV batteries were produced using nickel and lead, but as the technology advanced, they have since evolved to being lithium-ion based, which you will find in most EVs now.

But lithium-ion is not the only battery in town. There are also solid state batteries.

Solid state and lithium-ion batteries look and function similarly, which is to say much better than their predecessors. But when you take a closer look at the two, solid state batteries, that get their name from having a solid core as opposed to the liquid core of lithium-ion ones, have a lot more going for them.

This solid core equates to a better charge rate of getting up to 80 percent in 15 minutes. Plus, solid state batteries don’t break down at nearly the same rate. Lithium-ion batteries start to degrade after 1,000 charge cycles, while solid state ones remain at 90 percent after 5,000 charge cycles. And perhaps most importantly for consumers who are nervous about trusting their batteries, there is the potential for it to extend the range of EVs significantly.

But like many things in life, there’s a catch. Right now, you are much more likely to see solid state batteries in watches and pacemakers which are clearly much smaller than automotive vehicles. The costs to scale them up to size is prohibitive. The hope is that as more research and development dollars are invested in solid state batteries, the less costly they will become to operationalize them in cars of the future.

So, while there is good progress underway, we may have to wait before we can jump into an EV and not worry about how far we are going.

The second big area that will separate our cars of the present from those of the future is autonomous functioning. Being able to simply hop into a car and punch in your destination (or even just tell it where you want to go), is a lot easier said than done.

Google started working on autonomous vehicles back in 2009. And Waymo – “a new way forward in mobility” – an autonomous driving technology company became part of the parent company, Alphabet, sometime after that. Since then, the company is still working away at the all the challenges that come with trying to navigate to a destination in various geography and conditions.

As an overly simplistic explanation, autonomous driving cars use cameras that can track what’s going on around the vehicle as it travels along. The car will then react to avoid potential objects. In addition, they use light detection ranging to estimate the distance between the car and another object.

But, after more than $100 billion invested into autonomous driving cars and years of testing, the whole technology has advanced quite slowly. The new hope is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can take the massive amount of data that is required to make calculations and decisions on the road in a matter of milliseconds as well as have the car learn while it drives itself.

In an article for the MIT Technology Review, Raquel Urtasun, who led Uber’s self-driving efforts for four years, commented on the current state of autonomous-driving cars: “There is way too much overselling in this field.” She went on to add, “There is also a lack of acknowledgement of how difficult the task is in the first place.”

Manufacturers will need to evolve their production lines and their workforces to accommodate the super-acceleration of technology that comes into play for self-driving vehicles.

One of fundamental challenges is that humans and machines perceive and interpret the world differently. We humans see the road, hear the sirens, feel the motion, and make our decisions by some combination of intention and reaction – and each of us is different! One driver may not make the same decision as another, and some make better drivers than others, but we who drive seem to manage it fairly consistently. Accidents happen, of course.

With cameras and sensors, an automated system can also see, hear, and feel the world around it – perhaps even better than any human can – but the interpretation and of those collected measurements and then the decisions made from it are complex. It’s not a linear problem of adding up some conditions and reaching a result. It more like looking at a vast field of potential outcomes and picking the best path. Can an AI driver make better decisions than a human under the same conditions?

One of the most important questions that will need to be answered for autonomous cars is what does “safe enough” look like? In the U.K., the government is planning guidance in the form of a “safety ambition” for autonomous vehicles that will require them to be as safe as a human driver. Which may come as a relief to British motorists, but the criteria may be less about the science and more about what the public is willing to tolerate.

Moreover, accommodating autonomous cars on the road may mean changing the rules of the roads and maybe even the roads themselves to make conditions safe for all travelers. The U.K. Department for Transport has said that some cars, coaches, and trucks with self-driving features could even be operating on motorways in the next year.

With all that said, there is another side of the coin and it comes from one of the biggest players in the autonomous driving space, Tesla, and CEO Elon Musk who told participants at an energy conference in Norway in August, “The two technologies I am focused on, trying to ideally get done before the end of the year, are getting our Starship into orbit…and then having Tesla cars to be able to do self-driving.”

So maybe there is a breakthrough on the horizon after all.

The final piece in our car of the future is the driver experience. The emphasis may well be on the experience more than the driving. The beginning is how you communicate with your car. Voice recognition technology may enable us to simply talk to our cars. This is already happening for some of us when we say Hey Siri, or Alexa, but it’s not like we are talking about where we want to go and what we want to do on the way there.

But, as voice recognition becomes more sophisticated and plugs into a more advanced AI in your car, more things will be possible. And from there stepping into your car may be more like being in an airplane cabin with entertainment or work options as well as food and beverages. Screens as big as 30 inches are already being shown in some vehicles. It’s these bells and whistles that seem most likely to make an appearance in next-generation cars.

Ultimately, the utopian state of future car travel may not even be mainly about driving. If AI technology takes over, car drivers may become more like passengers with more free time as they drive to their destination in cars that produce virtually no emissions and improve overall safety for everyone.

Driving can become an opportunity to get more time for yourself, your phone and your coffee – without all the stress that comes from being on the road.

The post Where Would You Like To Go?<p class="company">What’s Next for Electric Vehicles</p> appeared first on Manufacturing In Focus.