This week on the blog, Noel Nevshehir, Director of International Business Services and Global Strategic Partnerships here at Automation Alley, discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the economy and the opportunities for small-to-midsize companies interested in expanding their markets overseas. The good news: There is a lot of room for them to run.

Advance manufacturers around the world build different things with different workflows in different places. Yet there is one thing that remains the same among them all: the drive to create a higher performing product as efficiently as possible. Tim Finerty, Shareholder at Clayton & McKervey, joins us on the blog to talk about taking that big step to intelligent factory automation and the broad range of benefits that brings.

Evolution requires transforming the status quo into different production paradigms. Processes must become increasingly reconfigurable, flexible, and scalable. Digitalization is the fundamental enabler of these new manufacturing paradigms, and real-time communication between operators and the manufacturing system. This week on the blog, Paolo Avagliano from Comau shares how digitalization can help you experience higher productivity, faster time-to-market, lower operating costs and prevent risk of operational delays.

The cloud is usually the first thing people think about when they hear the term Industry 4.0. However, the cloud is just the tip of the iceberg. The real strength of Industry 4.0 stems from digitization, which begins with connectivity. This week on the blog, SICK shares their five-step process to allow existing machines to become significantly more intelligent with very little effort.