In the US, 3.5 million middle-skill jobs go begging—jobs that don’t require a four-year college degree, but often do require hands-on OJT and/or a two-year associate’s degree, said Scott Scriven at the recent PROCESS EXPO in Chicago.

The Water Risk Monetizer, a publicly available financial modeling tool, has just been released with a new revenue-at-risk assessment program. The web-based tool, co-produced by Ecolab and Trucost with aid from their partner, World Resources Institute (WRI), was first introduced in November 2014 to help manufacturers and all water users get a truer picture of their water risks—present and future.

In 2012, industry (comprised of manufacturing, agriculture, mining and construction) accounted for about one-third (30.6 quads) of the US’s total primary energy consumption, according to a recently released DOE report entitled “Barriers to Industrial Energy Efficiency.”

For some time, industrial manufacturing companies have been looking for ways to bring together the seemingly divergent needs of enterprise networking systems and the real-time requirements of plant floor communications systems.