Database Technology to Improve Financial KPIs
Manufacturing Insights
Manufacturing operations create massive amounts of data. To use that data to improve financial KPIs it takes a single verifiable version of truth that every person can access and understand.
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How Will Tariffs Change Your Supply Chain?
Manufacturing Insights
Given the tariffs announced last week, it’s unlikely that any supply chain moving forward in 2025 will look like it did in 2024. The question is: how will tariffs impact your supply chain? To help us make sense of this information, today’s podcast features an expert who has his ear to the ground when it comes to supply chain challenges and what smart leaders are saying we should do in this changing climate. Ron Crabtree is the host of the MetaPod podcast where he talks with supply chain experts from around the world about the challenges of building a modern, resilient supply chain. He’s...
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Mitigating the Impact of Tariffs – Your Questions Answered
Manufacturing Insights
Everyone in sourcing, procurement, and manufacturing has questions about tariffs. Not only will they impact my bottom line, but how do I know which of my products are impacted? And how do I make the right decisions about my supply chain with the minimum amount of disruption and the best chance of resilience in the future? Today, two experts will discuss how they obtain these insights using aPriori. Originally recorded as a live , this presentation walks through how to use aProri to see the impact of tariffs on your bottom line, make trade-offs between sourcing strategies, and analyze your...
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The Risks of Doing Procurement As Usual
Manufacturing Insights
Procurement teams can't solve today's challenges of changing tariffs, rising materials prices, and shrinking time windows, if their best tool is email and excel. In this third conversation between LightSource CEO Spencer Penn and aPriori’s director of product Marketing, Chris Jeznach, we hear what’s missing from the current procurement model in most manufacturing companies today. And we’ll learn how new software technology can help bridge that gap. Spencer Penn draws from his vast experience working at Tesla and then founding LightSource, where he aims to revolutionize direct procurement...
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What Stops Sourcing and Engineering Teams from Achieving ROI together?
Manufacturing Insights
For manufacturers who want to reduce cost, improve performance, and bring innovative products to market, sourcing and engineering teams should be a match made in heaven. Sourcing can help engineering avoid costly redesigns by sharing what’s possible to make in today’s market, while engineering can help sourcing get a head start in finding the suppliers with the right capabilities to make products at cost and at scale. But it often doesn’t happen that way. Today we’re discussing what holds back procurement and engineering teams from reaching their full potential together. It’s all...
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Procurement Best Practices from Tesla and Beyond
Manufacturing Insights
Procurement teams can learn from early successes and failures at Tesla, especially when it comes to trade-off analysis and early collaboration between design, sourcing, and suppliers. In this podcast, LightSource CEO Spencer Penn talks about trade-offs at Tesla between cost, performance, and risk.
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Fix Tomorrow’s Labor Shortage Today
Manufacturing Insights
To solve the labor shortage, manufacturing companies must re-brand as great places to work for a diverse group of workers including women and GenZ. What does it really take to attract, train, and grow a workforce that includes workers from a diversity of backgrounds? And what can manufacturers do today to make sure we’re ready for that labor market of tomorrow? Mariana Cogan is a former SVP at PTC and the current head of Marketing at Hexagon America. From her vantage point as a winner of Forrester’s Program of the Year and Full Circle Insights Greatest Overhaul Award, Mariana Cogan is...
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The Cost of Offshoring for US Manufacturing
Manufacturing Insights
When you think about offshoring, restoring, or nearshoring, you’re probably thinking about cost. Certainly, the cost of labor and energy is a primary deciding factor when it comes to offshoring, restoring, or neashoring decisions. But what about the hidden costs of offshoring? This is a subject our guest knows a lot about. writes about the hidden costs of offshoring and the increasingly apparent benefits of nearshoring. He is the author of .
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Engineering Velocity: How to Make it to Market without Cost Creep
Manufacturing Insights
What does it take to balance high product development velocity with cost efficiency? In this Executive Talk podcast we hear from Hank Marcy, Former VP Global Product Technology, Whirlpool Corporation, about how he employed a modular strategy and smart tools like aPriori to keep costs down and velocity high.
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The 2 Biggest Challenges Facing Manufacturing in 2025
Manufacturing Insights
In 2025 manufacturers are facing pressure from all sides: Inflation Labor shortages Fluctuating materials prices Uncertainty about the future of tariffs All impacting decisions for offshoring or nearshoring This is a perfect moment, in other words, to reconsider strategy and make sure you have the insights you need to make crucial strategic decisions about your manufacturing operations. To learn how today’s forward-thinking manufacturers are staying ahead with the information they need to mitigate risk and keep a lid on costs, we are hearing today from someone who spends her life talking...
info_outlineThe rise of AI-driven modeling tools has some people in manufacturing scrambling to understand the impact of artificial intelligence and wondering how the product design process will change as a result.
Over the past year we have seen in real-time user-friendly AI tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and AI image generation from midjourney disrupt the markets for graphic design, web design, and social media content creation. Is product design and manufacturing prototyping the next in line for AI-powered disruption?
Today I'm excited to talk to one of the early founders of AI technology, CEO of Fire&Spark, Dale Bertrand. Dale was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research at Brown University where he also trained as an electrical engineer. His experience using AI to solve engineering problems puts him into a unique position to understand how AI design tools for manufactured products might be changing the workflow for design engineers and even the scope of design projects in manufacturing today.
I wanted to get a sense from Dale Bertrand based on his experience both in the AI field and in the engineering field, whether the innovations we are seeing today in generative AI and machine learning have any real bearing on the way products will be designed and manufactured in the future. I started our conversation by listing some of the AI innovations I've seen transform the creative process in other industries, and asking whether these digital products have any bearing on the future of manufacturing.