Around Christmas of last year, Cincy Magazine published a story about a pilot program that the Kroger chain of grocery stores had unveiled in Centerville. The Centerville Kroger Marketplace began using drones to deliver grocery orders in July of 2021. The chief technology officer of Drone Express; a drone manufacturer out of Monroe, Ohio, which has partnered with Kroger; had this to say about the program: "'Autonomous drones have unlimited potential to improve everyday life, and our technology opens the way to safe, secure, environmentally friendly deliveries for Kroger customers,...The possibilities for customers are endless—we can enable Kroger customers to send chicken soup to a sick friend or get fast delivery of olive oil if they run out while cooking dinner.

Quick announcement: The day after we published our post on the chip shortage, Intel unveiled plans to build a new chip manufacturing facility in Ohio, which they claim will be the largest in the world. For more information, check out this story in  City Beat magazine.

At the risk of rehashing old news, the world is currently in the throes of a computer chip shortage, due in large part to stresses put on global supply chains by the COVID-19 pandemic. Stephen Shankland, a staff writer at CNET, wrote a helpful summary about the issue this week.

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are quantifiable measures of a company's performance over an interval of time. KPIs vary from sector, company, and even department; but there are some recurring patterns when it comes to categorizing KPIs. The most common kinds of KPIs measure finances in someway--revenue growth, cash flow, profit margins, and so on.

The internet of things (IoT) has brought about numerous changes in the manufacturing sector. Perpetually connected devices within a firm's operations enable greater security, expanded automation, insights into efficiency and safety, as well as a greater degree of planning and organization than in the age of paper.

Innovations in industrial technology can make an operation more efficient and--potentially--more profitable. This is especially true when it comes to data collected and used both on the factory floor and the administrative office. One of the risks, however, with this new reliance on digital data is over-accumulation of large amounts of unused or inaccessible data in a firm's data lake.