Industrial

Geo Strategy Partners has conducted numerous renewable energy studies and the glaring reality is most alternative sources cannot reach power grid parity without government subsidies. However, experts were predicting that solar would reach power grid parity by 2016, but that was before the price of oil plummeted.  If the new technology referenced below is commercially viable, solar still might eclipse ...

In the world of marketing and communications, Business-to-Business and Industrial has always been the ugly stepsister of Consumer Package Goods marketing.  Madman Donald Draper would never waste his creative energy to try and sell a pressure vessel to a petrochemical plant.  And engineering-driven manufacturers have always been suspicious of marketing’s return on investment, and more focused on sales.  But that ...

There’s another contest in the offing.  In the race to commission the first nuclear plant in this century, Tennessee Valley Authority is whomping Southern Company’s Georgia Power.  According to Forbes [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/17/first-american-nuke-plant-in-21st-century-to-open-soon/], TVA’s Watts Bar 2 is “now over 90% completed, after the fully assembled reactor vessel was installed in August.”  WB2 got Westinghouse’s AP1000: the same model slated for Georgia ...

Does a focus on product improvement (incremental or disruptive) come at a cost to process innovation?  It shouldn’t.  Companies should do both. Product innovation done right drives sales.  Process innovation done right has the potential to do more: reduce defects (increasing customer satisfaction), increase throughput without capacity expansion, reduce unit cost, decrease energy costs, reduce inventory (raw materials/finished goods), and ...

Early last year, two studies brought us face to face with Petrobras and PEMEX.   Both market opportunity projects were commissioned by global OEMs interested in selling product into the oil & gas industry.  In Brazil, we green-lighted the opportunity and highlighted strategies most likely to result in sales success with Petrobras (unique and differentiated product, an understanding of local content ...

Featured speaker William L. Strang, senior vice president of operations, TOTO USA told a crowd at MODEX in Atlanta that TOTO has substantially moved manufacturing of products destined for the US market from Asia to the US. “Seventy percent of the products sold in the US today are made in the US.  As few as seven years ago, 63% of ...