Connell Limited Partnership, a global manufacturer serving the automobile, appliance, mining, rail and industrial equipment industries, has completed its acquisition of SencorpWhite, a provider of automated systems for the packaging industry through its Sencorp, Ceratek and Cerapak product lines.

Hitachi Consulting has entered into an agreement with SAP to provide an integrated Enterprise Cloud for SAP for Industrial Machinery & Components (IM&C) application.

As an industry, manufacturing is "hot." Regions are creating manufacturing initiatives, countries are creating policies to lure manufacturing back and prepare the next generation of talent, maker fairs show entrepreneurs and small-scale artisans how they too can design and manufacture their own products, what manufacturers sell goes well beyond the 100-year-old recipe and the mechanical drawings, and new technologies are changing the economies of scale so that large- and small-scale value chains can be successful.

Aspen Technology Inc. has released enhancements to version 8.8 of its aspenONE Engineering software.

For more than two decades, companies have been excited about a revolutionary industrial process that has the potential to reinvent manufacturing.

Of manufacturers planning to add production capacity over the next five years for goods consumed in the U.S., more plan to add that capacity in the U.S. than in any other country - a sharp reversal since as recently as two years ago. And a rising percentage of U.S.-based executives at the manufacturers say they are already in the process of reshoring production work from China. These are among the findings of new research released today by The Boston Consulting Group.