LOCATIONS
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22 Jan 14. Lutra Associates Limited has moved its HQ to Dorset. The move has provided the company with greater capability, better facilities and greater capacity to host meetings and communicate via a faster broadband service. The move of many of the MOD capability branches out of London to front line commands and other headquarters made the move sensible and cost effective for the company. Journey times to its main clients and contacts have halved, even without traffic jams, with the consequent savings in fuel and time. Faster broadband service provides better communications and time and cost savings.
23 Jan 14. GE Intelligent Platforms announced the expansion of its facility in Huntsville, Alabama with the formal opening of a new building. Huntsville is a key location for GE Intelligent Platforms, serving the defense and aerospace industries as well as multiple industrial markets. In attendance were Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, Alabama Secretary of Commerce Greg Canfield, Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, Madison County Commissioner Dale Strong and Jody Markopoulos, President and CEO of GE Intelligent Platforms. The new building creates a Center of Excellence that will be at the heart of GE Intelligent Platforms’ growing systems business, which sees GE delivering the value that is increasingly required by demanding prime contractors, systems integrators and OEMs in defense and other industrial industries as those organizations look to focus on their core competencies. GE’s Huntsville facility is home to 235 employees, including engineering, manufacturing and administrative functions. The expansion allows for consolidation of operations into a single facility housing the designers and developers of GE’s high performance, rugged integrated systems in the same building in which those systems are manufactured and built. Synergies are created to allow for faster, more responsive product development – from prototyping to production – and shorter lead-times for GE’s customers. Housed in the new building are advanced capabilities for extended testing and analysis of the effects of vibration as well as for examining and implementing innovative cooling technologies. GE is perhaps the most experienced developer of rugged embedded computing solutions in the defense industry, which requires computing that can withstand the rigors of deployment in environments that are subject to extremes of shock, vibration and temperature as well as the ingress of water and contaminants. This expertise is also vital to applications in oil & gas, power and metals industries.
23 Jan 14. Honeywell and US Army team-up for Rock Island Arsenal improvement project. Honeywell has partnered with the US Army to carrry out a $61m infrastructure modernisation project at the Rock Island Arsenal Joint Manufacturing Technology Center (RIA-JMTC), located in Illinois, US. The project aims to support critical infrastructure improvements at the facility, which will eventually reduce energy consumption by approximately 35%, simultaneously generating up to $5.3m in annual energy and operational savings. As part of the project, the company will implement a variety of facility improvements, such as installation of high-efficiency heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, including on-premise natural-gas heating, which will enable the facility to disconnect from the Garrison’s central coal-fired steam plant. In addition, the company will supply new plating and paint systems for the centre, as 90% of the parts manufactured at the facility go through plating and paint, receiving the surface coatings required for production of hardened, durable components for army equipment. The project is expected to save nearly 5.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, as well as reducing the Garrison’s eco-footprint by cutting an estimated 63 million pounds of carbon dioxide each year. Work on the project is scheduled to commence this m