On a Tuesday in Mexico City, employees at DSV Air & Sea, S.A. de C.V. were in the middle of a normal workday in the head office when a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck - killing more than 350 people.

Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Gamesa are giants of the wind-power industry, building mammoth turbines that rise high into the air and power more and more homes. But disappointing earnings reports from the two companies last week indicated that even they are struggling to adapt to a fast-changing sector.

A lean management structure and forward-looking corporate culture is essential in building a smart manufacturing industry, according to experts at Dassault Systèmes' Manufacturing in the Age of Experience conference - where the move to smart manufacturing was a central theme.

Shoppers will no longer be able to buy Whirlpool, KitchenAid or Maytag appliances at Sears, following a pricing dispute that has ended a 101-year relationship between the department store chain and the country’s largest appliance maker.

When Elon Musk talks about the future of factory automation at Tesla, he envisions new breeds of robots and smart machines compressed in dense factories with little room for human operators, guided by self-learning software.

As the leadership team at a consumer products company debated its digital strategy, two opposing views emerged. To stay competitive, some argued, the company needed to invest several hundred million dollars to automate its existing network of large regional plants.