Manufacturing And Warehousing News — May 12, 2014
By Trisha Leon, contributing writer
In the news, a patch is available for a Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition system to address a Heartbleed vulnerability. Also, articles examine protecting your customers who are part of a supply chain from cybercrime and how your clients can benefit from a warehouse control system.
Siemens Releases Security Update For SCADA System To Address Heartbleed
A security update to address the Heartbleed vulnerability is available from Siemens for SIMATIC WinCC Open Architecture, a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. The Computerworld article also provides information on addressing vulnerabilities in other Siemens’ products.
If Your Customers Are Part Of A Supply Chain: Protect Them From Cybercrime
An article in The Guardian addresses “How to protect your supply chain from cybercrime.” The article points out as companies grow, they become a part of a complex supply chain, and each new connection is a possibility that a cybercriminal will find a way in — not only to one part of the chain, but to the whole network. Ensure your customer is not the weak link that makes the entire chain vulnerable.
Your Clients Could See ROI From A Warehouse Control System
To stay ahead of the challenges of the 21st century supply chain, manufacturers have been investing in automated equipment, especially in their distribution centers (DCs), which three out of four managers believe have the highest potential to increase productivity. Many organizations have attempted to automate their DCs with individual components in various locations throughout the DC. This is “a step in the right direction,” Randy Marble, director of software solutions, Wynright Corporation, says in Manufacturing.net, but he believes it could be taken one step further. A warehouse control system (WCS) would unify the components and communicate with the warehouse management system (WMS) allowing an overview of the entire material handling system to easily see where adjustments, improvements, and maintenance need to be performed, thereby optimizing flow in the supply chain.
Pricing And Sales Effectiveness Solutions Can Help Your Customers Stay Competitive
Your manufacturing customers could be among those who recognize that the status quo in pricing practices can’t be sustained — approximately 28 percent of manufacturers are using manual spreadsheets for pricing according to the 2013 European Pricing Maturity (EPM) Study. If they don’t change their approach, they find themselves at risk of falling behind those that have automated their approaches to pricing. The EPM study, cited in Manufacturing how it’s made, reveals that pricing and sales effectiveness are increasingly becoming top-of-mind challenges for manufacturers. Leading manufacturers are using data analytics to identify common buying preferences and prescribe new pricing and selling strategies unique to each customer segment. They’re also identifying additional products and services that similar companies are buying. Investing in pricing systems will result in a significant profit improvement.
Manufacturing And Warehousing IT Talking Points
Analysts often have very different, often vague ways of defining cloud computing. Eric Knorr and Galen Gruman of InfoWorld break down the main cloud services in the article “What cloud computing really means,” from SaaS cloud computing to utility computing and Platform-as-a-Service. They state that as it stands now, cloud computing might be more accurately described as “sky computing,” with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually, but as virtualization and service-oriented architecture (SOA) permeate the enterprise, these isolated services can more readily connect, producing an agile, scalable infrastructure.
R&D magazine reports that a graphene photonics breakthrough promises fast-speed, low-cost communications. Associate Prof. Baohua Jia led a team of researchers from Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics to create a micrometer thin film with record-breaking optical nonlinearity suitable for high performance integrated photonic devices. He says, “Currently with telecommunications or all optical communications you have to fabricate each component individually and try to integrate them together. Now we can provide a film, on which everything can be fabricated with laser and then it is automatically integratable.” The fabrication and laser writing of this photonic material is simple and low cost compared to current manufacturing methods of photonic chips, and the use of this material demonstrates the possibility of manufacturing a scalable and cheap material.
For more news and insights, visit BSMinfo’s Manufacturing And Warehousing Tech Center.