FAIRFIELD, CT—Henry Ford was fond of saying that “nothing was particularly hard if you divided it into small jobs.” He followed his own advice, built the world’s first large-scale assembly lines that cranked out millions of Model Ts every year, and left his competitors in the dust. GE engineers are now taking Ford’s advice to the extreme and breaking down the factory into even smaller pieces: bits and bytes.
CHICAGO—An innovative plan to turn a former window manufacturing plant here into a national laboratory dedicated to the burgeoning field of digital manufacturing inched closer to reality Tuesday.
CHICAGO—The U.S. Department of Defense awarded $70 million to UI Labs of Chicago, a public-private partnership that will combine the award with $16 million in state funds and other contributions to form a Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute.