The Thomas Blog

The Pitfalls of Engagement – Turning Off Your Readers

When crafting a good story, we often start by coming up with a main character. We work on developing someone who is reliable and likeable overall. But as you focus all of your attention on the “who,” are you forgetting about the “why?” When telling an engineering story, this is especially important.

Technology That Can Improve Safety In Manufacturing and the Supply Chain

Whether you think technology is making our lives simpler or more dangerous, it is undoubtedly pushing the capabilities of humanity forward. In the right hands, it has been making the world a safer place to live in.

Technology has the ability to keep us — and our industry — safe. 

Meet the Manufacturer Pioneering Sustainability, Green in Industry

Gage employees at the Rainbow Run in downtown Ferndale, Michigan. The company sponsors the event, which helps foster diversity and acceptance in the community, every year.

Many manufacturers are just now jumping on the chance to reduce waste and adopt “green” tendencies, but Gage Products has been doing so for decades.

What to Do When Your Website Isn't Enough

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about new CAD and BIM tools or data formats that design and sourcing professionals want to access from their preferred manufacturers.

Most manufacturers rely on a basic website and phone number to handle these inquiries, often with poor search and insufficient data to allow customers to easily discover products and download the right data for their workflow.  A positive digital customer experience is critical to attracting, retaining and converting customer visits into leads and ultimately sales. A top-notch experience is becoming critical wherever your products are discovered.

Boosting Manufacturing Efficiency with Kaizen Events

Experienced engineers may have heard the term “Kaizen” at some point. It’s a Japanese term meaning “continuous improvement.”

While the concept is relevant to businesses everywhere, it has caught on in the West primarily in manufacturing industries.

Optimizing Your Email Lists for Google Customer Match

Organically building a high quality email list for people in your target audience has been strategically important for decades. After all, email is one of the only channels that you have complete control over when communicating with your audience.

The Top 5 Stories from Manufacturing Day 2015

Every beginning of October, manufacturers across North America dust off their shops and open their doors to the world for Manufacturing Day. From grass root political efforts to educating students on the lifeblood of the country, the day also kicks off Manufacturing Month, which continues to celebrate everything the industry does for the country and the economy.

Where to Start with Factory Automation

 To remain competitive in an evolving industry, manufacturers are turning to automation. But where should companies begin?

Chad Blair, president of RT Engineering Corporation, compares automating a facility to writing a book. “Manufacturers need to understand what the ultimate story looks like so that as they’re writing an individual chapter, it makes sense in the context of the rest of the book. You can’t solve any one problem without a way to integrate it with the total solution.”

Engineer Q & A – Schlumberger Engineer Among Women Fueling the Future of STEM

If you were on Twitter at all this week, you may have noticed a number of posts discussing the importance of women in STEM careers. And if you were online on Tuesday specifically, you likely saw that #AdaLovelaceDay was trending across the Twittersphere. The day is meant to celebrate a woman who is largely remembered as the first computer programmer. To further commemorate the advances women have made in technology and engineering, we’ve chosen to highlight a female engineer in our next Engineer Q & A series installment.