H&P Insights: Setting the Standard for Cleanliness; Make Manufacturing More “Local”; Back to “Normal" on the Horizon
Setting the Standard for Cleanliness
There are a number of global standards that address the issue of contaminants for hydraulic fluids. This week’s Hydraulics & Pneumatics article points to four specific ISO standards: ISO 11171, ISO 11943, ISO 16889 and ISO 4406.
Beyond this, the article takes a more general look at how and why to keep contaminants clean and filtered.
Almost all of the benefits of a strong filtration and clean fluid program are costs that don’t affect the cost of the fluid itself. A strong filtration program cuts downtime and supply waste and extends fluid life. That results in lower labor costs, both for routine maintenance and major repairs, and lower energy costs, since an efficient machine won’t have to work as hard.
Setting up such a program, as the article notes, also is an efficient use of time and manpower.
Making Manufacturing More “Local”
In a wide-ranging video interview with Senior Editor Rehana Begg, Augury Founder and CEO Saar Yoskovitz said the lessons from the global pandemic should be viewed closer to home. Yoskovitz said the need for a more agile manufacturing operation that was driven by the COVID crisis also resulted in a fresh look at supply chains and how machine learning can drive greater efficiencies.
But he also said the emergence from the pandemic creates some important opportunities for a national manufacturing initiative. “It’s understanding how important it is to invest in local manufacturing. And to me, it’s a long-term investment; it’s not just how do we build more factories, but how do we build the right foundation in our education,” Yoskovitz said. “As an example, providing a whole new skill set to a new generation entering the market. Skills that will be required from a maintenance technician five years from now are very different from the skill set that was required 10 or 15 years ago. But our education system hasn’t adapted to that yet.”
For more of Yoskovitz’s insights, be sure to check out our companion piece to the video here.
Back to “Normal” Still on the Horizon
Depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, you can see the arrival of 2022 as next year, or just nine months away. In either case, it’s the time when manufacturing in particular and the U.S. economy in general is expected to unwind itself from the impact of the pandemic.
Consider the findings of the 2021 KPMG CEO Outlook Pulse Survey, which indicate that some of the changes in business during the pandemic—work at home, digital collaboration and changes in the supply chain—will become permanent parts of the business landscape.
According to Brian Heckler, national industrial manufacturing sector leader, KPMG U.S., two themes rank high in people’s minds: “The first is digital business—digital customer engagement, digital ways of collaborating and working within the workforce, and all the knock-on implications of that. The second is reliability—reliability of your workforce to be able to be safe, reliability of your supply chain to be able to deliver what you need when you need it, and the reliability of your systems and processes to be safe for your customer and for your people.”
