Features Manufacturing

The February 2019 landslide brought chunky boulders, splintered tree limbs and goopy piles of soil down from the steep hills above the Pali Highway, which links Honolulu to the east side of Oahu. Damages closed the road for nine months as the state’s Department of Transportation rebuilt the road, extended a shed-type roof to better […]

Most of us could never conceive of the incredible amounts of data amassed in the manufacturing of wire. But because Rea Magnet Wire’s products are used in intricate, high-functioning capacities—such as car motors, transformers and electrical substations—every inch is tracked, measured and inspected, and those tens of thousands of data points are uploaded and shared […]

The latest high-tech augmented reality glasses may be the last thing one would expect to see at egg farms in Iowa and Ohio. But when something needs repair or deeper insight at Versova, employees can now slip on the problem-solving eyewear. As if by magic, a supervisor—located anywhere—can connect and guide the project from afar, […]

In a plant in Marietta, South Carolina, miles of fabric methodically turn around large spools in the world of automotive fabric manufacturing. In years past a person would be tasked with spotting minute defects of thread, lint or color. Requiring patience, dedication and deep concentration, it was a time-consuming job to make sure the quality […]

Upon commencing with the duties of the office of CIO for his new employer in June 2018, David Hayes didn’t know that family-owned Englert Inc. was being positioned for sale. Its credentials as a national roofing and gutter heavyweight based in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, were well established, but as Hayes soon realized, something stood […]

When he was 11, Daniel Fields welded a brush shredder to an old three-wheeler to clear brush on his family’s farm. It made the chore much easier, he remembers, but not all his time-saving endeavors worked so well—he almost lost some fingers. Today, that knack for experimentation and creative problem-solving is strong as ever for […]

Dan Zalacain thinks back to his early days in IT at Macy’s a decade ago. Back then, a technology crisis could erupt into a 4 a.m. conference call with a hundred programmers scratching their heads to understand what’s wrong and the fastest way to fix it. Work-life balance? It didn’t exist. But Zalacain, who joined […]

It only seems like a long time ago when so much of the infotech of Air T Inc. was contained in a single-server closet in a hillside airport in rural North Carolina. That was less than a decade ago, when Donald Aslett was consulted for some long-overdue IT upgrades. But the executive team at Air […]

His letterhead still says CIO but Hector Cantu would like to see another letter added, that being a P. That’s P as in process, for the role of chief information officer is evolving, and maybe nowhere faster than at Grupo Villacero Mexico. That’s the country’s largest company dedicated to marketing, transformation and logistics in the […]

It’s a simple enough goal Michael Loggins espouses in his role as info-tech director at SMC Corp. of America, the U.S. division of the Japanese heavyweight for pneumatic control engineering in support of industrial automation. “Our job is to make people awesome,” the personable Loggins tells Toggle in February, several months after commencing a project […]