Rapid Results Review: The New 3 Rs to Innovation, Quality, & Time to Market
How important is innovation? According to the Strategic Management Journal, for thought leaders in the industry, innovation is nothing short of critical. The journal’s recent report: The effect of introducing important incremental innovations on market share and business survival offers a direct and measurable correlation between innovation and market share: “The more often an industry incumbent was among the first to introduce important incremental product innovations the greater its market share, while adopting innovations that had been introduced by competitors had a small positive relationship with greater market share. The greater the number of competitors that introduced similar products, the greater the market share of firms that were first to market.”
Whether you’re talking about incremental design enhancements, exciting next generation products, or simply optimizing development time and costs, today’s product development processes hinge largely on both expanding and expediting the interaction between design and analysis. With simulation as the key to new product innovation, for these benefits to materialize, simulation results reporting must be fast, accurate, and useful to design teams.
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Simulation-Based Training and the Great Supply Chain Disruption
The global supply chain disruption is one of the foremost issues impacting today’s port terminal operations. According to S&P Global, container dwell times for many ports reached near record levels. Worse yet, these bottlenecks are expected to continue, with some experts calling it a new reality that will necessitate a fundamental change to the world’s shipping infrastructure.
Regardless of how long it may last, the truth remains that we find ourselves immersed in a global disruption. Ports are working feverishly, with many regularly breaking single-day material handling records. Yet despite this, nearly 13% of the world’s cargo remains in limbo at any given moment.
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3 Challenges Facing Forestry that Simulation can Mitigate
In a world where perception often has more impact than the truth, the forestry industry continues to face some very real challenges to its image on a number of fronts, from environmental responsibility to workforce diversity, and pace of technology adoption.
Fortunately, steps are being taken to overcome such PR challenges, and simulation-based training is emerging as a driving force to combat these obstacles and help reshape the image of the forestry industry.
Today, simulators are widely employed throughout such sectors as construction, material handling, military, and more to train heavy equipment operators. As a training technology, simulators are shown to accelerate learning and improve retention as compared to traditional methods. And while enhanced training outcomes are clearly their overriding asset, simulators can also support company or industry initiatives in less obvious ways.
Read the entire blog post here.
How simulation can help forestry & logging companies manage the skills gap
Forestry continues to be a major contributor to the global economy, fueled by a growth in housing and need for lightweight and renewable packaging sources. However, the industry is facing a growing labor shortage that makes it difficult to find and develop qualified forest equipment operators.
Worldwide, the trend in the supply of skilled labor is the same from construction to manufacturing and forestry – as workers retire it’s getting harder and harder to replace them with the next generation. Retired Oregon State University professor, John Garland, explained that the median age of forestry workers is well into middle age. In fact, it’s even likely to be over 60 for vehicle drivers and equipment operators. Consequently, shortages are expected to reach even higher levels as retirees exit the workforce throughout the coming decade.
Despite ongoing efforts, the number of workers joining the industry remains low. Operating heavy equipment within the confines of a timber harvest worksite involves a great deal of potential risk, responsibility, and stress.
Read the blog post here.
Fabricators that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment, it’s easy to think of software as an insignificant purchase. Relatively speaking, most applications are small investments, and many are pretty much the same anyway, right?
While that might be true for some programs, estimating software can have a measurable and sustained impact on your bottom line, making it well worth your time and attention. After all, if you
believe sales are the lifeblood of your business, then estimating software is arguably one of the most important purchases you’ll make.
While the actual software itself clearly tops the list, there are a few things you should evaluate regarding the company behind that application – some obvious, others not so much. Here are five often
overlooked areas to keep in mind when choosing an estimating software partner.
Read more here.