A blog based on an interview with Bill Pollock, CEO of Optimation

Manufacturing in America:

No matter your level of awareness of why domestic manufacturing is of vital importance, the truth has always been that our safety and sovereignty as a nation are rooted in our ability to be resilient and independent. The so-called "global economy", something that is full of opportunity and wonder in many ways, has had an unintended consequence that we must collectively correct. 2020 proved that to us all.

Skid Based Systems are one type of innovative solution for designing new or modifying existing manufacturing processes. Skid systems are named for their ability to be fabricated in their entirety ready to subsequently be integrated into a process for either permanent or temporary use.

As manufacturers strive for a zero-incident workplace, they fight with realities like the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This law essentially says that entropy exists in nature and the natural course of entropy is the tendency of systems to go towards disorder. What that means for all human activity - be it manufacturing or making an omelet - is that we must exert quality energy to combat this natural law. We at Optimation take this very seriously and we know that when we reach a benchmark, we must celebrate with setting even higher ones.

You may be a startup firm with some promising IP and a dream, a researcher with a lab scale manufacturing line, or a manufacturer with an established product and a great market who needs additional manufacturing capacity. In each case you need a new manufacturing machine or a new production line, and you need a firm skilled and capable of designing and fabricating the unique and custom manufacturing equipment and systems to meet your requirements. There are a lot of different products and even more ways to manufacture them. Your product may be a food product, a pharmaceutical or a chemical. It might be a discrete product requiring machining or assembly or an item manufactured at high speed on a roll-to-roll process and then converted to its usable form. Independent of what it is you need and how it is manufactured, how do you find a qualified company to design and build it for you? In many cases you will start a search on Google or ThomasNet, testing several key words try to find a few qualified suppliers that you can talk to. After you do that, how do you vet them, check capabilities, and make the best selection for what you need to have engineered, designed, fabricated, and commissioned?

Electrical safety is important because electricity may cause serious injuries, or even fatalities.

Many companies making high tech sophisticated products require testing prior to selling and/or end-user installation. Putting these products thru a thorough and vigorous test process will not only satisfy client requirements but will also give you peace of mind that your products can withstand the rigors of real-world environments once they have left your company. A heavyweight boxing champion in the US once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Just like sports, that is true in our fabrication & testing industry.

Technologies such as fuel cells are not just for NASA. It is true fuel cells helped get humans into space and to the moon 50-60 years ago and will soon perhaps to Mars. But those fuel cells weren’t cost-effective enough to become accessible to other applications that are more familiar to us, like driving a car or powering our offices and homes. Nuclear plants, coal-fired utilities, and natural gas along with petroleum led the way for decades.

90 million Americans received the $1,400 stimulus checks this week. The recipients are part of the first wave of payments that totaled more than $242 billion, the Treasury Department, IRS and Bureau of the Fiscal Service announced Wednesday. Additional batches of payments will be made in the coming weeks. Recipients of this first tranche include those who provided direct deposit information on their 2019 or 2020 tax returns, or who submitted their information through the IRS non-filer tool last year.

Skilled trades are needed now more than ever.

America is facing a massive skilled labor shortage. According to the Department of Labor, the US economy had 7.6 million unfilled jobs, but only 6.5 million people were looking for work as of January 2019 and it is more apparent than ever that our country is suffering because of it.