The beauty of business process automation How often have we entered the same information into two different systems and wondered, “Why do I have to waste my time doing this?” These are computers, aren’t they? Shouldn’t this information flow where it needs...
Continuous Integration (CI) is a critical piece of any company’s software development practices, and usually the first effort on the road to DevOps. Within optimal continuous integration practices, engineers submit and test new developments against the main body of...
If you’re like many engineering managers, IT infrastructure may not be your favorite topic. You think about it when absolutely necessary, but often neglect it or place it behind other capital investments. What's more, there's a good chance your current IT solutions...
When it comes to IT solutions, most mid-market manufacturing companies rely on one of two options. They have a dedicated in-house IT team, or an outsourced IT managed services provider (MSP). But manufacturing companies who care about product development and...
Picture this: all your engineering applications run slow, or worse, continue to shut down. Yet, the IT team reports no alerts within the remote monitoring and management systems despite the problem. What is the root cause and how do you fix it? Remote...
When licensing your Windchill Requirements Validation & Source (RV&S) server, there are a few options for purchase or implementation. Many readers may recognize Windchill RV&S as the latest version of PTC Integrity -- or, if you have worked in...
In recent years, interest in engineering design automation across multiple industries skyrocketed, especially due to the high return on investment (ROI). Relieving your engineers from tedious, error-prone tasks and directing them toward automation presents a fantastic...
We are thrilled to announce that SPK and Associates won the Channel Futures / Channel Partners 2020 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 501 Award for a second consecutive year! This prestigious award is widely viewed as the most comprehensive global survey of Information...
What is a Continuous Integration Pipeline? The purpose of a continuous integration pipeline is to allow teams to constantly integrate and build software updates in order to quicken release cycles, lower costs, and reduce risks. In a simple implementation of a...
Repeatability is an intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it comes down. If you throw it up twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down twenty times. When repeatability doesn’t occur and it’s supposed to, we get anxious. ...
I was intrigued by the information and conclusions presented in OnShape’s recent report, “The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2019.” However, I was not as surprised as they were to hear that the biggest problem in R&D is still complex processes,...
We’ve hinted at it throughout this series, but now we’re going to say it explicitly: To get the most out of the cloud you should be combining solutions. At the very least, you should be thinking more flexibly than “AWS is for engineering, Azure is for IT.” Does Your...