Good article in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday on the “bullwhip effect” as it relates to Caterpillar. Caterpillar Inc. recently told its steel suppliers that it will more than double its purchases of the metal this year—even if the company’s own sales don’t rise at all. What does a company like Cat do when it is rebuilding inventories? It means big increases for suppliers. How does a supplier cope with a sudden surge in orders after a long dry spell in survival mode? How do you beef up ordering and production if you are a small firm whose credit lines…
Author: apalmes
For my 65th birthday on December 16th my daughter gave me a goat. When she told me about the gift I figured it was an effort to expiate the curse of the billy goat on my cherished Chicago Cubs. But no, this was an animal with an even better purpose. For my Medicare birthday Sarah purchased a goat in my name from the WorldVision charity, which I’m told ended up in a small farm in Ecuador where it will provide milk for a family. The gift gave me pleasure, not only because it ended up in South America and not…
By Lloyd Graff Connecting the dots from Wednesday’s news. Scott Brown, the Republican, won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, which he had held for 47 years. Brown’s résumé includes posing nude for Cosmopolitan in 1982 and having a daughter who was both a semifinalist on American Idol and a starter for the Boston College basketball squad. Then there’s the saga of competing Somali pirate teams threatening to shoot at each other and blow up a Greek oil tanker if they don’t collect a ransom. Don’t forget about Kraft’s $19.5 billion takeover of Cadbury, the $145 billion in tainted investment bankers’ bonuses,…
GM’s Precarious Centenary Soft hums and gentle whirs fill the small studio hidden deep within the General Motors Technical Center, in the Detroit suburb of Warren. In one corner, designers and engineers keep their heads bowed low over their CAD/CAM screens, their labors transformed, at the other end of the building, by a set of automated milling machines carving new forms out of lumps of soft clay. What emerges could shape the future of the entire company. “We know we have a perception problem, at GM,” admits design executive Bob Boniface. Where environmentally-conscious consumers look at Toyota and see “Prius,”…
Today’s Machining World Archive: June 2008, Vol. 4, Issue 06 Noah Graff spent the first week of April in France’s Haute-Savoie region, just across the border from Geneva Switzerland at a press junket held by the Arve-Industries Haute-Savoie Mont-Blanc Competitiveness Pole (Arve-Industries for short). This is his account. While famous for its ski resorts and mountain lakes, France’s Haute-Savoie region also happens to be a hot bed of screw machine companies; small to medium, privately owned firms whose origins date back to the clock making industry of the Middle Ages. Arve-Industries, named for its location in the Arve Valley, is…