Innovations in Manufacturing Tech
Manufacturers have long been at the forefront of technology. Today, this trend continues, but with new, innovative tools that are designed to make business more efficient and workers more productive. This technology has helped much of the manufacturing sector despite costs continually rising, supply chain interruptions, and other variables. Let’s take a look at some of the major technology changes that have fueled manufacturers during the past few years.
Enhanced Digitalization
Manufacturers typically take materials and turn them into consumer goods or components for other manufacturers to use in their process. Many manufacturers have begun the process of digitization; meaning that they now are using digital systems to manage their business, interact with customers, and handle all the automation that has been tabbed to make their process more efficient. Most manufacturers have been using digital technology for quite some time, but some of the shifts that make these changes innovative include the leveraging of robots to do collaborative tasks.
Cobots
Artificial intelligence fuels this trend by using machines that are colloquially called “cobots”. Over 40% of manufacturers use robots and with smarter software the “cobots” can work alongside human workers rather than outright replacing them. This means these robots are much more affordable than traditional robots that typically replace human workers.
IoT
Another digital evolution for manufacturers comes from the Internet of Things. These sensors may not be built specifically for manufacturers, but they hold considerable value for them. The biggest benefit comes in the manner of predictive maintenance. Sensors can keep track of components and maintenance schedules, which can cut down on maintenance costs by a whopping 25 percent. If you consider that downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars an hour, the more you can do to keep systems functioning as intended the better your business will be.
Machine Vision
Another use of AI in manufacturing is called machine vision. It lets companies automate their quality control processes on each end of their business. Basically, it allows a manufacturer to run their operations faster than they would if they relied on humans to run point over their quality control. With machine vision detection, manufacturers can increase production and maintain a level of quality they expect from their process, a win-win for any manufacturer.
Technology can help any type of business, but if you’re a manufacturer that could benefit from innovative new digital tools, reach out to the IT experts at Point North Networks at 651-234-0895 today.
Remote Work Is More Normal Now that It Has Ever Been
Remote work is more common than ever before, but it wasn’t always this way. It’s still a relatively new method of operations, and while there are quite a few benefits for both employees and employers, there are other impacts related to remote work that can have far-reaching consequences.
We want to address some of the positive and negative impacts that this remote work trend has had on society.
Housing Costs and Availability May Balance Out
Big cities might have more opportunities for employment, but the cost of housing often makes it difficult for people to commit to employment opportunities in these areas. There is often a housing shortage in metropolitan areas, and as things stand now, the country is short almost 4 million homes (as of early 2021), with most of this shortage being located in places where these jobs are considered valuable.
Remote work, if the shift to full-time remote work is utilized, means that these jobs can be filled by people without requiring them to purchase or rent a home in these high-cost locations. Someone working remotely could work remotely for a company halfway across the country and live in a place where housing costs are significantly less expensive. Some experts believe that this trend would increase the cost of living in more rural or suburban areas while decreasing the costs associated with big city life.
However, if this is to become a reality, there needs to be a balance between the increased cost of more affordable housing and decreased cost of urban living. One example can be seen in the Tulsa Remote program, where Tulsa, Oklahoma residents are offered several perks—including a $10,000 grant—to all those remote workers who come to live in the city for at least one year. This type of investment means that Tulsa has been attracting new, high-earning residents, resulting in a return on their investment of $13.77 for each dollar spent on remote workers willing to relocate to the city.
The Climate Could Benefit
It’s reasonable to think that a decrease in urban living would lead to more vehicles on the road, as the decrease in public transportation access and walkable amenities would mean more people driving from one place to another. However, what if the opposite were true? What if having more people in these less-urban locations means that there would be greater incentive for these walkable amenities or greater demand for public transportation? The climate would surely benefit if this were the case.
Remote work has also led to a significant decrease in travel for many people, such as eliminating the morning commute, business travel, cross-country air travel, etc. All of these decreased emissions could do wonders for the environment.
Let’s Be Clear—We’re a Long Way from Ubiquitous Remote Work
We’ve discussed some of the obstacles, like changes in housing costs and zoning laws, but some places simply aren’t remote-friendly. Access to the Internet limits remote work capabilities for some people, especially when you consider that much of the country still doesn’t have access to broadband Internet.
Despite these obstacles, however, we are committed to helping your business make a shift to remote work, should you desire to make that change for your organization. To learn more, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
Explaining VoIP and Its Immense Benefits
Communication solutions are especially important in today’s world of remote and hybrid work, and we are here to tell you that the traditional telephone solution you’ve known and loved for all these years is simply not viable in today’s business environment. Thankfully, a viable replacement is widely available, and it’s all thanks to Voice over IP technology.
What is VoIP?
Your traditional telephone solution involved working with your local telephone company to run lines and cables all over your business’ office and installing handsets for your employees to use. There was a lengthy implementation process that heavily relied on the physical setup of your office and the number of employees your company employed.
VoIP, on the other hand, uses a service you already have—your Internet connection—rather than your traditional telephone infrastructure. Through the use of smartphone or desktop applications, VoIP helps to eliminate barriers of entry for telephony solutions and instead focuses on making services accessible to all types of businesses, regardless of infrastructure or current setup. Since VoIP is a software solution rather than a hardware solution, it is more dynamic and flexible than your traditional telephone system.
What Benefits Does It Bring?
VoIP is notable because it offers comparable services to your traditional telephone system but without the limitations that come with it. Here is just a short breakdown of what you can expect from a VoIP phone system:
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All the features you know and love:
VoIP is capable of all the features you use for your traditional telephony system, plus some that you might not normally get, such as video conferencing and instant messaging.
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Quick setup:
Instead of running cables and knocking down walls, you just download an application and set up your accounts. Because of this, it’s an easy and efficient way to leverage telephone solutions to your benefit.
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Accessibility and flexibility:
Since VoIP applications can run on smartphones or desktops/laptops, you have control over how you choose to use VoIP.
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Cost savings:
Oftentimes you might encounter telephone providers who try to lump together services in an attempt to squeeze as much out of their customers as possible. With VoIP, you don’t get any of this—you purchase the solutions you need and nothing more.
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And more!
Don’t Wait Any Longer!
If you are ready to take your business’ communications infrastructure to the next level, we are confident that VoIP will help. To learn more about what VoIP can do for your business, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
Building Trust in Business with a Consistent Approach
For a worker, one of the most maddening things that can happen at work is when there is a lack of consistency with the leadership. It can throw a figurative wrench into everything that you are trying to accomplish. Some examples of people not being consistent include:
- Not doing something when they say they will.
- Not showing up to meetings on time or at all.
- Creating business processes without announcing changes and then expecting people to know what to do without being briefed.
- Promising new services without checking if the company can deliver.
- Guaranteeing success without a plan to do so.
Inconsistency can cause turnover, inefficiency, poor customer service and support, and many other poor results. It affects workers, customers, and even potential customers. Today, we thought we’d take a look at how consistency is important.
Consistency Shows Respect
We might as well start at the most troubling part of being inconsistent when you run a business: it shows a complete lack of responsibility. As a business owner, your staff has to take your lead and your customers make commitments based on your word. If you are just flying by the seat of your pants in every situation, the lack of consistency will be apparent.
Many people take an inconsistent approach, especially one that shows a lack of interest in the issue at hand, to be a giant slap in the face. The best leaders are the ones that lead by example. Doing the right things for your staff and for your customers will be reciprocated at a very high percentage. Building trust has to be on the short list of any organizational leader’s to-do list, so setting the tone and being consistent can really help establish trust.
Consistency Creates a Culture of Accountability
When you work with other people, there has to be some accountability taken by each member of the team, especially in a management capacity. If you are managing people and they have inconsistent results, you wouldn’t say they were doing a good job, would you? The same goes for when you are managing people. If you bring inconsistent leadership, you will get mixed results, inflated costs, and a general lack of productivity.
Consistency Allows for Useful Analysis
One often overlooked reason to prioritize a consistent approach is that if things are done consistently then you can get reliable metrics for any analysis you are going to do. It may take some time to build consistency with new platforms, but after some time (at least three months), if the issue you are trying to measure has been carried out consistently, after a pretty short period of time it will give you the notion if it is working or if it isn’t.
Consistency Defines Your Business
Nowadays businesses do more to manage their reputation than at any other period in business history. They have to, they are exposed in ways older businesses weren’t. If customers and workers get a fair shake and find that your business’ processes are carried out consistently, the negativity will be muted. Consider a Major League Baseball Umpire. His job is to call balls and strikes, and he may have a wider or taller strike zone, but if he constantly calls the same pitches a strike, hitters won’t complain too much. Your business can still be innovative and do things outside the box, but if you change things repeatedly with no warning, people are going to get frustrated.
How consistent is your business? What do you think the most important part about being consistent is? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below and return to our blog for more great business and technology advice.
Companies Need to Keep Their Vendors’ Security In Mind
Data breaches have a tendency to destabilize relationships. With so many data-related problems befalling businesses nowadays, it is important that each side of every data-driven relationship understands their role in the protection of other organizations’ data. Today, we’ll take a look at the issue and how to determine if your partners are putting in the effort required to keep your data secure.
Are Your Vendors Properly Protecting Your Information?
We’ve seen businesses have a litany of challenges protecting their sensitive data over the past several years, and as threats get more sophisticated it poses more problems. Additionally, many businesses outsource a fair amount of their operational and support efforts and that can have a negative effect on their security.
So, how do you know that your vendors are protecting your information?
You ask them, of course.
Before you onboard any new vendor, you should come up with a questionnaire that asks the right questions about how they handle their own cybersecurity, and more specifically (and importantly) how they go about handling your information.
At Point North Networks, we do this for all of our clients to ensure that they are partnering with reliable companies that, at the very least, are attempting to do the right things to protect sensitive information.
Questions You Should Ask Your Vendors
The first thing you should consider when making up some questions to ask your vendors about security is: do you understand the answers? If you don’t know what you are doing, you could just assume any thoughtfully answered response would be sufficient. This is far from true and is a liability, especially in trying to ascertain what risk your business is facing by doing business with a company. We can’t stress enough that if you don’t have someone that knows what they are doing, you need to find someone, as this will serve you much better in times like this.
Let’s go through a couple of important questions you should ask if you do have the competence available to sufficiently measure risk from the answers:
- Do you collect, store, or transmit personally identifiable information (PII)?
- If so, do you store your PII onsite or in the cloud?
- How do you provide users access to the PII you store?
- Can PII be accessed remotely?
- Do you constantly monitor all services, systems, and networks?
- What regulatory bodies does your business operate under? Do you have proof of compliance?
- What kind of encryption do you use for data-at-rest? Data-in-transit?
- Do you consistently patch your software?
- Do you have mobile device management and IoT management systems?
- Do you utilize legacy systems that aren’t supported by manufacturers?
- What cybersecurity tools do you use?
- Do you have language in your agreements about vendor cybersecurity?
- How are your continuity systems?
- How would you go about the situation in the event of a data breach?
- What authentication procedures do you use?
- Do you train your employees on the best practices of cybersecurity?
There are many more questions you can ask, and you should ask them if you find them necessary. Vetting your vendors is a great way to know if they have your best interests in mind.
If you would like to partner with a company that not only has your best interests in mind, but also can help you ascertain if your other partners do as well, give Point North Networks, Inc., a call at 651-234-0895 today.
Remote Work is Not Without Its Issues… How Can They Be Addressed?
The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it no small amount of uncertainty, including amongst business owners who were looking at a very up-in-the-air future. With so many lacking the technology needed to support remote operations—never mind the fact that remote work was a new concept for so many—the learning curve was a considerable hurdle. However, with vaccines being administered and restrictions lifted, it now becomes critical to find a balance.
How Work Needs to Shift
Despite many business owners resisting remote work on principle, it quickly became the only viable option for some organizations to remain open. Most of these businesses and their owners will want to return to the way things were before—but this may not be practical for some time, if ever. A study has revealed that more than 70 percent of employees who needed to suddenly shift to remote operations are hoping to see some of this flexibility carry over—even though half of these employees are also waiting to return to the office with anticipation.
While this may seem strangely counterintuitive, that much is to be expected.
The ongoing global health crisis turned most of the world on its head, including many impressions about remote work. While the escape of sorts from the office may have initially been a welcome change, the reality of the home environment and its additional responsibilities soon set in. While these employees don’t necessarily want to rush back into the office completely, remote work hasn’t agreed with them as well as may have been expected.
This experience has not been consistent for everyone, either.
Many business leaders are having a far easier time than their subordinates are, simply because of the disconnect that often occurs in remote work setups. In an office, it is much easier to pick up on the trend when someone is having a hard time. When a team is working remotely, these kinds of issues become more difficult to detect.
So, to compare…
Decision makers are earning more, enjoying their time more, and are more flexible in their work as they operate remotely, while the people they’ve hired are often overworked, unappreciated, and simultaneously abandoned while being told that a “familial work atmosphere” is important.
Poorly Managed Remote Operations Also Breed Stagnation
Your employees aren’t the only ones who will have a tough time with poorly-planned remote operations—your entire business could potentially see some drawbacks. Operating out of a centralized, shared location just makes it more convenient for team members to collaborate, which increases the quality of their communications and decision making.
Meanwhile, a year’s worth of remote conferencing has many people sick of it, just doing as much work as they need to so it can be considered “done.” In other words, without the face-to-face interaction of the office, many employees might become complacent.
In turn, the business could become complacent as well.
Making the Hybrid Office Work
Let’s look to the (hopefully) near future, when the restrictions that many businesses are subject to can be relaxed somewhat. Naturally, businesses are going to want their team members to come back at optimum productivity, operating from the place of business once again. Some people look forward to this, others, not quite so much.
As a result, many businesses will likely adopt a more hybrid approach to work, allowing greater access to remote work. Sounds pretty good, but it isn’t that simple.
There are a lot of questions that you’ll have to answer to do this. For instance, how many days will each team member be required to come into the office? One study polled executives to reveal that 68 percent of them would like to see their teams in-house at least three days out of each workweek. Workers conversely placed the maximum requirement at three days per week, with each employee’s responsibilities factoring into their requirement.
Globally, there is also a vast difference in how urgent in-office operations seem to different countries. In the U.S., 22 percent of executives see a return to the office as a priority. Similar companies in Canada, Germany, Japan, and China disagree, with fewer than five percent agreeing.
Unfortunately, the only thing that’s certain about this kind of hybrid work model is how uncertain we are about any of it. How will it impact the many metrics that a business is concerned about—from its culture to its productivity to its employee retention? What is the best option?
Frankly, there isn’t any single correct answer, simply because each business has its own unique situation.
Point North Networks, Inc., is here to help you balance out your business’ situation with IT tools and solutions so that your team members can perform the way you need them to. Give us a call at 651-234-0895 to find out what we can do for you.
