Many businesses and employees have experienced difficult times during the recent recession.  Businesses have shut their doors, jobs have been lost, surviving businesses have defined profitability as staying even with last year, and senior managers have explored new and different ways to keep businesses afloat.

In exploring new and different ways to keep businesses afloat, how many managers have truly utilized their teams to make the right things happen for the business?  How many managers have included their teams in facing the many challenges presented by today’s business environment?

Teamwork and collaboration within businesses are essential for competing in today’s global and challenging business environment.  The principal reason for forming and utilizing teams should not be only to get people interested and participating but also to make the right things happen for the organization.  Poor cross-functional teamwork is a sign of a losing organization.

However developing cross-functional teamwork and collaboration is hard work.  It requires focus, trust, the right people, a cross-functional mind-set on everyone’s part, cross-functional goals and spirit, business-wide business process management, teams which are empowered to make decisions, and information-sharing.

Regarding information-sharing, Jan Carlzon, former CEO of SAS, said “An individual {team}without information cannot take responsibility; an individual {team }who is given responsibility cannot help but to take responsibility.  Do managers give individuals/teams enough information to take the right actions and make the right decisions?  Are teams provided with information about the business’ finances and thus aware of what must be done to survive in these difficult times?

My experience says that information-sharing by many managers is not at the level it needs to be to allow teams to help the business succeed in these difficult times.  What’s your opinion?

Afarin Bellisario from Principal Transtrategy Inc. reports on Industry Week that the 21^st Century will be the age of glassy metals. These glassy metals are being referred to as “miracle metals.” Amorphous metal alloys (glassy metals) have several unusual properties such as: the highest strengths of any known metallic material; exceptional magnetism; wear/corrosion resistance; and a large ability to store elastic energy. The ease of manufacturing these metals is what is so extraordinary. They soften gradually when heated and don’t shrink during solidification like other metals. This allows for shaping and molding into very intricate designs. The article entitled, Miracle Metal: How Glassy Metals Will Define Manufacturing in the 21^st Century, also discusses the wide range of applications of glassy metals. A few of those applications are aerospace structures, gold clubs, and medical devices.

With the possibility of glassy metals transforming the manufacturing industry, reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals should pay extra attention to the applications of these metals. With glassy metals being used more frequently in manufacturing settings, people in the reliability and predictive maintenance industries should also know the properties of glassy metals, for they react differently than steel. This goes back to the importance of continuous learning, you will never know everything about your field, so you have to roll with the punches and learn and adapt to new technologies or methods with in the reliability and predictive maintenance fields.

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The article entitled, Expatriate Hiring Stalls, by Jonathan Katz, reports that the number one reason for hiring outside the United States is operations functions. Forty-five percent of the 99 respondents to the survey, across various industries, said they are keeping their foreign workforce levels the same despite the economic downfall. Another 35% of the respondents say they will decrease their number of expatriates. The manufacturing industry is the largest industry response group (accounting for 29% of the respondents) in the survey. So if manufacturing companies are sending work overseas, what does that mean for reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals? It means that there will be less manufacturing in the country, and therefore less potential work for people in reliability and predictive maintenance. The more manufacturing jobs that are sent overseas, the less of a need there will be for predictive maintenance professionals and reliability engineers in the United States.

People in the reliability industry and predictive maintenance industry should pay close attention to the number of expatriates being used in the manufacturing industry. The survey done by Sibson Consulting shows that organizations expected to increase their use of expatriates is 25%; 54% are not expecting any change; while 21% are expecting to decrease their number of expatriates