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Home Automation: No Engineering Experience Required

Here at Avanceon, we deal with automation on a daily basis. We work with controllers like PLCs to automate the operation of various devices like valves, pumps, and motors in order to help our customers efficiently and safely meet their production needs. In recent years automation capabilities have exploded outside of the manufacturing realm. Home automation is one of the areas where automation is being utilized daily by engineers and non-engineers alike.
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How to Relate to People Through Story-Telling

According to Wikipedia, storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared for the purpose of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values.  For example, here at Avanceon, in order to share our fundamental of “Appreciate, Celebrate, Enjoy”, we like to tell stories about the time our President dressed up like Snow White- I think he even wore a bra that day!
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Supporting Manufacturing IT Starts with Understanding Others

A common service we provide is assessing all types of manufacturing systems and recommend ways to improve and better support their operations. Over the past few weeks, I have been part of a team that has been digging into a new manufacturing company to understand their IT workflow process and niche software systems. It’s increasingly interesting to me to learn how different companies delegate tasks and utilize different software to run their manufacturing. Every company organizes their people’s contribution a little differently by choosing specific roles for each employee. But, so much of how a company operates their manufacturing systems is dependent on their size, maturity and what technologies and software they use. To the manufacturing novice, you could expect many companies to have an efficient and easy process to perform every operation and solve every problem, but in reality, that is not the case. Every manufacturer is a snowflake in some respect. By assessing a manufacturer’s systems, we take the time to dig in, learn, understand and put ourselves in a position to help them troubleshoot and improve their processes and in some cases their people’s actions.
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Cubicle Decor: There’s no place like Home (Office)

Everyone spends a significant amount of time at their desks and in their offices. It’s conceivable to me that people are, on average, spending more time working than doing pretty much anything else during the week. Personally, I try to make my workspace feel more like my home-space so that I feel more comfortable and motivated. I find that being surrounded by things that make me happy lead to productivity, efficiency, and a positive overall attitude. You may think I’ve gone overboard with my workspace (I’ve got your standard photos and tchotchkes of course, but I also made my own fabric wallpaper and hanging mobile!). But here are a few things that even the DIY-averse can easily do to make themselves more comfortable at their desks:
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Milking Existing Infrastructure: How Dairies Can Achieve Industry 4.0-like Results

Are you frustrated with all this talk of Industry 4.0, while you are struggling to keep the lights on?

Are you being asked to produce more products and product variants while grappling with reductions in staff and budget?

Is it getting harder to find replacements for those antiquated PLCs on eBay?

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