PARIS, ON—Forestry equipment manufacturer Tigercat has opened a new $12 million assembly plant here.

HAMBACH, France—Daimler wants workers at its Smart Car assembly plant here to put in more hours and has hinted that it may shift production if it cannot reach an agreement.

ST. CROIX, WI—Airworthy Aerospace Industries Inc., a manufacturer of aircraft interior components, is investing $4.6 million to expand its assembly plant here. The company is expected to create 45 new jobs.

KANSAS CITY, MO—Ford Motor Co. is scrambling to find enough steel frames to keep up with demand for its best-selling F-150 truck.

ZEELAND, MI—For the past decade and a half, office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller Inc. has been practicing sustainability: earning a profit, protecting the environment and improving their community.

HUNTSVILLE, AL—Construction on Polaris Industries’s new ATV assembly plant here is progressing quickly. The $48 million 775,000-square-foot facility is on track for a spring 2016 startup.

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Engineers at MIT have found a way to give robots more dexterity by using the environment as a helping hand. The researchers developed a model that predicts the force with which a robotic gripper needs to push against various fixtures in the environment in order to adjust its grasp on an object.

DETROIT—Ford engineers have morphed into exterminators—and for good reason. A common form of spider, it turns out, likes to nest under the hood in vehicles. That sounds harmless enough, but it can cause big problems, including possible fuel tank cracks that can ignite vehicle fires.

SPARTANBURG, SC—BMW is constructing a 527,000-square-foot body shop at its assembly plant here. The facility will include more than 650 robots.

TOLEDO, OH—Johnson Controls is expanding the production of absorbent glass mat batteries for automotive applications. Since 2012, the automotive supplier has devoted $130 million to manufacturing this battery technology.