- BIG DATA Beckons - One of the biggest topics in business this year is big data and related analytics. Thousands of companies are rapidly investing heavily in these technologies and practices, knowing that they are core to accelerating their advancement and also just maintaining their market presence. In recent news a local university, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT),… Continue Reading
- The Battle Over Contingency - What is contingency? What is it used for? Who controls it and dictates how it gets allocated? In a recent project there was a discussion with the customer about contingency vs. change. The customer saw the contingency as a “fund” that was set aside to handle surprises that came up during the project. These would… Continue Reading
- Manufacturing and the Internet of Things - The Internet of Things or IoT has been around for a long time but it has only recently reached mainstream as a term so that a majority of the population, if not everyone, knows something about what it means. There is a unique version of the Internet of Things known as the Industrial Internet of… Continue Reading
- Additive Manufacturing for Industry - Industrial giant and digital behemoth General Electric (GE) made big news recently with the announcement of a pair of major acquisitions. A pair of cutting-edge Additive Manufacturing (AM) firms from Europe (Arcam AB and SLM Solutions Group of Sweden and Germany, respectively) are being added to the GE portfolio in its Aviation business unit. More… Continue Reading
- Fall Into Year-End Planning - I guess it is time to say goodbye to summer and welcome in all that comes with autumn! It has been an amazing summer, but now the kids have gone back to school, the morning traffic has returned, it’s getting dark earlier, and it’s getting a little cool for a convertible or rolling all the… Continue Reading
- Inbound Marketing and Meeting a Client’s Needs - A great deal has been studied, written about and taught on the subject of selling. All of us in our daily lives are salesmen of some sort and all of us in our daily lives are consumer and buyers as well. If we think about our own buying experiences, we can begin to understand what… Continue Reading
- High Pressure Pasteurization and Food Quality - I can remember the days, decades ago, when you could stop at a country farm stand and buy a gallon of fresh squeezed cider that tasted exactly like fresh apples. Then one year the department of health stepped in and issued a mandate that all cider sold commercially had to be pasteurized. Suddenly cider tasted… Continue Reading
- How much transparency is too much? - Recently we received some excellent feedback from a client at the conclusion of a project. The scores were glowing, but one remark surprised us: the client stated that we might have been too transparent. At Optimation, we pride ourselves on transparency with our clients. As a service provider, you want to make sure the client… Continue Reading
- Automation’s Impact on Today’s Workforce - This past weekend we as a nation celebrated Labor Day. Americans observe Labor Day partly as a tribute to those who came before us in the workforce who established principles for equitable pay, safe work environments and reasonable conditions, and other improvements as new paradigms emerged. Of course Labor Day is also the traditional beginning… Continue Reading
- Need a Hacker? Hire One. - A great deal of news, discussion and time is spent dealing with cyber security. For a quarter of a century, since the time the internet first became available for commercial use, there have been security issues and computers and accounts have been hacked and their content compromised. I can remember discussions immediately after 9/11 about… Continue Reading
