Article by Jason Hier
May 17, 2012
May 12, 2012
Latest Online Collaboration News
As MIT and Harvard Announce Online Classes, Online Education Becomes More …
With the explosion of online learning, the site, Aspiring Nurse, will be able to help students earn online degrees. Lehi, Utah (PRWEB) May 11, 2012 Two of the top college institutions, MIT and Harvard, have announced their collaboration and creation of …
Read more on San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Altium and NXP collaborate to deliver component content online
"Collaboration with NXP has enabled us to provide easy access to the Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4 & Cortex-M0 based microcontrollers for our global Subscription customers," said Rowland Washington, Content Development Manager for Altium.
Read more on MarketWatch (press release)
Collaboration Drives Office 2.0
… where innovation and peer collaboration are welcomed. And if workers are not in the office, online networks can help connect multiple people from any location. “It is a sign of the times,” he said. “People can work from wherever they want.
Read more on GlobeSt.com
May 7, 2012
Award-winning Start to the Year for Lighthouse Systems, Helping Packaging Companies Around the World Become More Efficient & More Competitive
Rochester, NY (PRWEB) May 07, 2012
Lighthouse Systems are delighted to have been recognized by leading analysts Frost & Sullivan as being best-in-class for delivering Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to the packaging industry. The award for Global Customer Value Enhancement for MES Solutions in the Packaging Industry in 2011 recognizes that Lighthouse Systems has a constant focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond just good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and ultimately customer base expansion.
Tim Barber, Business Director said: We are proud to have brought such demonstrable improvements to our customers in the complex packaging industry in such a short period of time.
We are absolutely thrilled that such a reputable analyst as Frost & Sullivan has endorsed what Lighthouse Systems has demonstrated in factories around the world – that our flagship MES solution Shopfloor-Online brings our customers immediate benefits from improved productivity, improved quality, reduced waste, full traceability and a tool to standardize business processes across global operations.
The packaging industry demands high quality while operating in a very high volume, high-speed production environment. For these companies, squeezing more efficiency out of operations is a challenge. Frost & Sullivan observes: In this global, cost-competitive industry, packaging companies require enterprise-wide visibility to monitor and control their diverse worldwide manufacturing processes. They need a single, standardized solution that is easy to implement and will increase their return on investment. Increasingly, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution may just not be enough and many packaging companies are adopting MES solutions to standardize processes across their global business to drive operational excellence.
Shopfloor-Online supports all aspects of manufacturing across production, inventory, quality and maintenance operations. It connects directly with the ERP system and to manufacturing equipment, providing a real-time visibility of performance using dashboards across the factory, or across the world in multi-national deployments.
Implementation is carried out by Lighthouse Systems team of experts and includes requirements analysis, design, implementation, training and support, which is second-to-none in the industry, so a return on investment is achieved right from the start. Frost & Sullivan points out that Lighthouse Systems ability to work collaboratively with customers from the project conception stage to commencement and maintenance is truly commendable. Lighthouse Systems strives to ensure that every customers expectation is exceeded resulting in a rapid return on investment.
The Lighthouse Systems approach is to focus on the pressing business problems e.g. productivity, quality, traceability, logistics and build a solution using only the appropriate modules of Shopfloor-Online. In most cases, having realized the power of Shopfloor-Online, the customer extends the scope of the system, taking a stepwise approach towards full MES. The vision is one database for all operational data: one place that everyone, everywhere in the factory goes to for all factory information.
Lighthouse Systems is one of the leading MES solutions suppliers in the world, with hundreds of installations in 37 countries and annual growth in revenues of 40 per cent. For some time now, Lighthouse Systems has been one of the key go-to companies for packaging manufacturers due to its track record in deploying successful solutions, which have been accepted as a purveyor of best practice by major worldwide packaging manufacturers such as LINPAC Packaging, Rexam, Constar and Crown.
Frost & Sullivans full report can be downloaded from:
http://www.lighthousesystems.com
May 2, 2012
Latest Online Meetings News
Why women prefer online meetings
A survey suggests that women are driving a trend toward having more online meetings, rather than in person. The reasons might strike some as quite fascinating. by Chris Matyszczyk April 21, 2012 12:18 PM PDT Oh, look. They don't have a man on their …
Read more on CNET
Meeting Facilities Near Phoenix, AZ Boast Top Technology and Amenities
This hotel near the Phoenix Convention Center also takes the extra step to be environmentally responsible by using 100% recycled note pads, pens made from recycled materials, eco-friendly water service, online event menus, organic flowers, …
Read more on MarketWatch (press release)
April 27, 2012
Adequate Structure in Your Team Collaboration Tool
There are a large amount of tructure built into your team collaboration tool and its ability to adapt to various group needs. The tool structure makes users find it overwhelming and confusing if it is so complex and contains several hierarchical levels.
Non-Intuitive Team Collaboration Tools Present Challenges
Some online team collaboration tools are difficult to set up because they lack any intuitiveness. Even if the tools are chock filled with useful features, they will have no impact if users do not how to execute even the most basic actions. If the team collaboration tool is overly comprehensive, getting your members in a user “comfort zone” may be a huge challenge. A valuable tool possesses the ability to keep your entire team up-to-date about project progress.
If the tool provides little, if any, intuitive process for recognizing task completion, one member might be waiting on another to be finished with a chore before proceeding, never realizing that task was previously completed.
Portal Structure Adds to Efficient Workflow
Decision makers need to choose online team collaboration tools that offer either portals or separate workspaces where individual projects can be accessed. This allows them to create message threads for communication within the separate projects and give them the option to subscribe to updates through RSS alerts and e-mail. This compartmentalizing also allows members that do not need to participate in every thread the ability to remain off of it, avoiding unnecessary information overload. Furthermore, the tool should new project members to be easily added to existing discussions.
Central Document Storage
Any documents relating to a specific project need to be located in a single place for easy access so users need not to navigate through streams of endless threads to find a particular piece of information.
If this feature is not available with the online collaboration software you’re examining, the software winds up being just like e-mail (inefficient).
Wikis as Online Communication Tools
Recently, there’s been quite a lot of buzz about using wikis as online team communication tools. These easily editable web pages are excellent collaboration tools in certain scenarios. Their flexibility allows segregated groups to continually make contributions to an online shared body of knowledge- the most well known example is Wikipedia. They provide an exceptional model for people who need to develop specific software documentation, FAQ (frequently asked questions), human resource information and policy presentations as a collective body. However, they can be quite cumbersome to use for organizing and posting the essentials needed for team collaboration. An alternative to using simple wikis is to use a wiki based team collaboration software that allows you to create wikis, in addition to providing task, document and project management tools.
April 22, 2012
Collaboration
Google Docs is built around collaboration to help you get work done more quickly and efficiently. Learn more at docs.google.com
Video Rating: 5 / 5
April 17, 2012
Collaborative Advantage
Today, we are troubled by various global issues. Environmental problems, poverty, diseases are few of the common problems in our modern society. People are suffering and dying this very moment. Although some would conveniently blame it to others for what had happened, each of the problems is now moving closer to our doorsteps. Like it or not, H1N1 flu, floods, crimes, terrorist attacks could happen to anyone of us regardless of where we are.
As we are closely linked to each other through globalization, previous local issues are increasing turning into global problems. It has become difficult for one to overcome the problems with individual efforts. Issues like global warming, poverty, and pollutions require the world to come together just to mitigate the effects on our future. However, if we look back in our history, many of us have cultivated strong competitive culture that keeps us from working together towards common interests.
Countries went to war to compete for lands and natural resources, business organizations tried to outdo each other to gain profits and market leaderships, families and individuals fought with each other for wealth, status and ego. Eventually, resources are wasted on beating the competitions, while they could have been better used to improve the current states of our world. The same stories are still repeating themselves as of today and in the near future.
Why can’t we take a moment to rethink what these have brought us? Can we find another way to motivate our progress other than trying to beat our competitions? Instead of trying to emerge as winners by making losers out of our competitors, why can’t we share the winners’ podium? After all, we come with the same purpose in search for better lives, who are we to think that we deserve better, and other don’t?
We know that competitions lead to rich and poor gaps and inequality that have become the source of conflicts in human history. The world has become too small for us to strive and rob to feed our greed. This behaviour needs to be changed. Like it or not, we depend on each other to survive. We are interdependent rather than independent. We need to help each other to survive rather than killing each other to live. The new world needs a new thinking – that is to collaborate and not to compete, to help rather than to fight each other. The advantage is for people who can collaborate more, and not those who think they can compete better. The key is to move from being competitive to become collaborative. So next time, if you find yourself a competitor, let’s try to make he or she to become your collaborator.
It’s time to use our collective wisdoms to build our “Collaborative Advantage” rather than “Competitive Advantage”.
April 12, 2012
PalominoDB and SkySQL Join Forces to Offer Unparalleled Remote Database Services to Leading Companies Worldwide
Santa Clara, CA (PRWEB) April 12, 2012
PalominoDB, a boutique database operations and engineering consultancy, today here at the Percona Live MySQL conference announced a strategic partnership with SkySQL Ab, the first choice in affordable solutions for the MariaDB
April 7, 2012
Using the amazing new skype: An online collaboration
Steve Ramsey and I collaborate on a woodworking project using some of the amazing new features in the latest version of Skype. woodgears.ca
Video Rating: 4 / 5
April 2, 2012
FISHER/UNITECH to Exhibit in BIOMEDevice Show
Troy, MI (PRWEB) April 02, 2012
FISHER/UNITECH, leading reseller of SolidWorks