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Thank you for visiting the Pivot International blog. We are a collaborative product development, design, and manufacturing firm serving clients around the world. For more information about our services, please call us at 1-877-206-5001. We look forward to working with you.


 

How Digital Twinning Drives Cost-Effective Manufacture, Distribution, and More

Posted: April 6, 2022 As one industry leader put it, digital twinning is a way to break the laws of physics. How? Via simulations, companies that take advantage of this technology can travel back in time, accelerate time, and see into the future to gain actionable insights that drive business value.  From a technical perspective, digital twinning is the creation of an analytics model (or "mirror") of real-world systems, processes, and physical assets (inputs) that serve as the basis for processing real-time data and augmenting human decision-making. Using data from IoT sensors attached to input sources to analyze their real-time status, these virtual models and digital replicas enable AI programs or human operators to monitor and learn from them. This allows companies to quickly spot problems, improve operations, fuel efficiency, and increase ROI. 

Fast, Flexible, Flawless: How Advanced Pick & Place SMT Fuels ROI

Posted: March 30, 2022 Automated Pick and Place (P&P) Surface Mount Technology (SMT) has come a long way. Once a purely manual-meets-mechanical capability, this technology has advanced in lockstep with the demands of digital evolution, drawing its unparalleled power from breakthroughs in AI, computer vision, motion mapping, and IoT.

The Future of Data-Driven NPD

Posted: March 23, 2022

“Data” has been a business buzzword on the lips of almost every corporate consultant for at least the last decade. And while the prophets of data had many believers, the concept of data-driven operations for most companies has tended to remain more aspirational abstraction than concrete reality.

But with the acceleration of digital evolution hasted by the global pandemic, this is rapidly changing. And just in time. Data-driven technologies have the potential to solve or attenuate many of today’s most pressing problems.

Why Medtech Companies are Increasing Their Investment in Digital Marketing

Posted: March 9, 2022 All businesses know that marketing is essential for solving their larger product-success puzzle. For medtech innovations, digital marketing plays a distinctly important role in ROI for reasons not readily apparent to most companies. Why is digital marketing such a powerful tool for medtech developers? And what are the most profitable areas to allocate digital marketing dollars? Let’s take a look.

Four Post-Pandemic Trends to Watch: Manufacturing, Machine Learning, Sporting Goods, and Medtech

Posted: March 2, 2022 These days, it can seem as though every other headline or news report has something to do with the global pandemic or its after-effects. With so much COVID-related content flooding the media-sphere, it can sometimes feel like listening to a song stuck on endless repeat. The result? It can be tempting to assume you’ve already heard all the relevant information or to tune out entirely. While this is perfectly natural, it's precisely the wrong time to stop paying attention. Why? Because in the wake of something as world-changing as the global pandemic, it takes time for insights to distill and trend lines to form. And it's precisely these late-breaking insights and trend lines that are most worth waiting for. This article will examine four post-pandemic trends that companies should be paying attention to.

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LoRa, NB-IoT, or Cat-M1? Identifying the Ideal Solution for Your Innovation

Posted: February 23, 2022 Determining the ideal product solutions for developing a successful IoT product can be less than a straightforward affair. Even with consumer IoT products, strategic tradeoffs must be made between size, weight, power, and cost considerations. (The so-called SWAP-c equation.) And for IoT products intended for industrial or medical markets, this equation becomes exponentially tougher to solve.

Is Domestic Manufacturing a Viable Alternative for Your Company?

Posted: February 17, 2022 Companies large and small are resorting to drastic measures to ease supply chain pressures. The largest enterprises are paying previously undreamed fees for private charter, mid-size companies are increasingly seeking to build private fleets, and businesses of all sizes are scrambling to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable sourcing problems. While there’s no single fix for the current supply chain crisis that will benefit every business, domestic manufacturing may be an option that is too quickly taken off the table. While resolving specific supply chain struggles is simply a waiting game, there are viable alternatives that many companies can act on now with the advantage of a domestic supply partner.

Key Findings From the Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index Report

Posted: February 2, 2022 As the global economy is buffeted by supply chain challenges ranging from the rising costs of commodities and transport to the availability of raw materials, economists at the Federal Reserve have taken action by creating a new tool for analysis. The Global Supply Chain Pressure Index draws upon 25 years of data and a diversity of metrics to map, measure, and manage the adverse impacts sustained by the global supply chain and economy. Its findings have been extensive and varied, but a unifying theme is clear: during the pandemic, supply chain pressures achieved a meteoric rise — a rise far exceeding projected trend lines which reached its presumable zenith in October of last year. And while the details of this rise across sectors are extensive, it behooves supply chain professionals, policymakers, and business leaders to be aware of the following key findings.

What if the Answer to Supply Chain Shortages Doesn’t Lie in Procurement?

Posted: January 26, 2022 To appreciate the task that U.S. policymakers and supply chain leaders are faced with in overcoming supply chain shortages, imagine trying to quickly and easily turn a ship around that’s the size of the Empire State building. (Carrier ships of this size have played prominent roles in the “Containergeddon” scenario recently seen in the LA and Long Beach ports.) Such a ship represents nearly forty years of offshoring and dwindling domestic manufacturing capability, and this ship will not be turned around quickly or easily. It will take multiple years and billions of dollars to build new chip factories and ramp up production. In the meantime, demand for new tech is skyrocketing as the wheels of the fourth industrial revolution roll inexorably on.

Ten Imposters That Can Jeopardize Your New Product Development Project

Posted: January 19, 2022 If you’re developing a new product, you already know the purpose of observing best practices is to create the conditions necessary for achieving market success. But because research-backed approaches to New Product Development can sometimes seem counter-intuitive, leaders often end up implementing "best practices" that turn out to be imposters. In this piece, we’ll call out the culprits and provide some touchpoints for helping companies course correct.