Many of us played with LEGOs when we were younger, and they are still pretty common today. However, if you haven’t kept up with what all LEGO offers in the recent years, you might be quite surprised. There are a few product lines that many people may not be familiar with that offer a tremendous amount of engagement and critical thinking for children and young adults.

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We’ve all been there…working on that project, which never seems to go right. The project has passed hands multiple times. There is miscommunication between the customer, salesman, and the engineers. Every new idea you attempt doesn’t seem to work as expected, and when you finally find a solution that works, it decides to stop working when the customer is watching.

While no one enjoys being in these positions, at one time or another every company will experience one. And the question is how do you save face?

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Recently, I had a discussion with a friend who works with one of our integration partners, and during our discussion we came up on the topic of leasing as an option for capital equipment. For anyone who doesn’t know, capital equipment is typically a larger, higher priced item with a lifespan of more than one year. It is an asset and an investment for the company purchasing, or in this case, leasing it.

After doing a little research, I found out that leasing capital equipment is actually a very common practice for all sorts of companies, large and small. This makes sense because there are many benefits to doing so…

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During the design process of any system, it is desirable to know how the possible range of input values will affect the system output. One back-of-the-envelope method is to assume the amount of resources the system will use, err on the high side, and protect yourself against failure.

However, what if you are designing a race car component? Would it be necessary to always be conservative? If you are, your competitor will be faster, more nimble, and will speed right by your driver. Understanding your risks–or the range of inputs that will play a role in your system design–is the first step in creating a mitigation strategy.

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The topic of robotic, or automatic, mixed pallet building has come up quite a bit recently, so I thought I’d share some of the benefits and challenges that go along with it.

To give you some background, a few years ago companies started building rainbow packs, which are basically a box or bag of products that contain smaller quantities of different flavors or product lines. This allows consumers to sample a variety of items without buying large quantities of each.

So what does all of that have to do with robotic mixed pallet building? Well, the concept of rainbow packs actually stemmed from the advent of mixed pallet building first used by the material handling and logistics industries.

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