USA and Canada

Rich Hite, President of QC Software, a Tier 1 warehouse control systems solutions provider, suggested, “Even the best WMS has a brief lag time in transmitting of instructions to a high-speed sortation system. There are simply too many warehouses with tens of thousands of decisions being made daily that require split-second timing.”

Representing an AGV vendor is often a conflict of interest. The end-user customer’s interests may not align with the AGV vendor’s interests. The only way to avoid these conflicts is a vendor agnostic approach to automation. As a sales manager for several automated guided vehicle (AGV) companies there was an intention: sell AGVs. Performance was measured by number of vehicles sold per month, per quarter, per year, year over year, and at a measured profitability.

The historical perspective is easy to grasp. Automated product movement is a well-established, easily understood concept. It is so familiar and normative that many in the material handling sector consider conveyance technology little more than a commodity. That is a wild over-simplification. Conveyor solutions are developed from dynamic and complex challenges which require safe, ergonomic, tested and proven products, developed by creative people with a focus on lean manufacturing continuous process improvement.

Deregulation (better described as re-regulation) came later to Ontario's energy sector than for example to the UK where it happened in the 1980s. The Energy Competition Act of 1998 (ECA) had as its ultimate goal the creation of a competitive market in the electricity and natural gas industries.

The US telecommunications firm plans to pay $48.5 billion in cash and stocks in order to gain access to DirecTV’s 40 million digital TV customers in the US and in Latin America. The deal would also give AT&T a new source of revenue beyond its traditional telecommunications business.

“The company itself commenced operations in 1994 with only a small handful of employees, focusing at that time on electronic products, repairs on remote control system, lights and radios,” explains Marc Lamothe, Business Development Manager for Meglab. “When our President, Louis Valade, bought into the company in 2005, bringing with him some 30 years of mining experience, he quickly set about establishing a whole new electrical division within the company.

It's really not long since we last spoke to Éléonore's energetic site manager Guy Belleau, but in the space of little over eight months – eight months with a severe Canadian winter in them by the way – the site has changed beyond all recognition. Belleau has lost none of his infectious élan. “We are on the last stretch now. I can smell the gold. We promised we would be pouring gold in the last quarter of this year and that is what we will be doing!”

Reports claim that the technology giant could be prepared to pay as much as $3.2 billion for the headphone maker and music-streaming service provider, which was founded by music producer Jimmy Iovine and rapper Dr Dre.

If completed, the deal would become Apple’s largest ever acquisition and is being seen as a move by the company to cement itself further in the phone and music accessories business, while also bolstering its online music offerings, two areas that are predicted to see massive growth in the coming years.

Tucked into a corner of Chaleur Bay in north-eastern New Brunswick (NB), Bathurst claims to be the only truly bilingual municipality in Canada, with exactly half its 12,000 population claiming English as their first language, half French, and most of them comfortable with either. The body of water to the north may have been named with irony – this is northern Canada and much of the year chaleur is in short supply.