In the age of ecommerce and emerging drone delivery technology, two young inventors from Chicagoland and their startup, Valqari, decided it was time to modernize the mailbox for the 21st century. They partnered with East Peoria, Illinois’ INTEGRIS Engineering to help bring their smart drone delivery mailbox to life.
Read about how two Illinois firms have partnered to bring a modern mailbox for the drone delivery market to life in the August Issue of InterBusiness Issues.
Read about how two local firms are working together to design and build a critical part of the grain transportation chain. This is a great example of collaboration between two Greater Peoria Manufacturing Network members, Premier Fabrication of Congerville, IL and INTEGRIS Engineering of East Peoria, IL. These two central Illinois companies are working together to design and build barge spouts, which are used all over the world.
3D printing Muscle Car parts? At INTEGRIS we are car enthusiasts as well, and were approached with a very interesting proposition, could we 3D Print near factory correct parts for an ongoing muscle car restoration? Us, always exploring new ways to do things, did not run from this challenge! This will be a teaser of what to come in a much longer (and in depth) blog post about how we went about this project!
We were given a Hood Scoop that was in need of fiberglass repair but also needed the mounting studs repaired after several decades of neglect and water infiltration. Our original thought was to glass them back to factory shape, but an INTEGRIST had a different idea, after helping his son with a spoiler project, he thought to 3D print & re-stud the mounting supports. This would involve using a CAD program to model up the correct shape and then 3D print with ABS to ensure heat tolerance, but would provide a near-factory (albeit hard to tell) solution. So we got to work taking measurements and 3D printing test pieces. We’re going to leave this right here with a pic, and stay tuned for an overview on the final product here in the coming weeks.
3D Printed Hood Scoop Mounting
East Peoria, IL (April 19, 2016) – INTEGRIS Group, a leading innovator in the field of product development, recently worked with Peoria, IL based SIMnext to engineer and develop the industry’s first dynamic ultrasound training solution: DR Doppler. DR Doppler provides clinicians and students with a variety of simulations of pathological blood flow that they might not frequently see in clinical practice. This technology will enable them to develop new skills and stay current on their existing skills.
Due to the complexity and detailed nature of the system, SIMnext has chosen INTEGRIS Group to continue the partnership by manufacturing the DR Doppler Dynamic Ultrasound Trainer right here in Central Illinois.
INTEGRIS is honored to be chosen to help diversify the manufacturing core of the Greater Peoria region by adding High Tech Medical Manufacturing to the mix. INTEGRIS co-owner, and Greater Peoria Strategic Manufacturing Group member Andy Berberich, was in attendance last year when Congresswoman Cheri Bustos announced her vision of Peoria becoming a Medical Manufacturing Hub for Illinois. This partnership between SIMnext and INTEGRIS is a great start. “We are proud to represent Central Illinois and the variety of manufacturing disciplines we have here, this step to a High Tech hub lays the foundation for a future of growth within the region,” states Berberich.
The manufacturing of DR Doppler is expected to begin in Q2 of 2016, with production increasing over the next 5 years. INTEGRIS will manufacture the system out of their East Peoria, Illinois facility, shipping DR Doppler throughout the world.
“We are very excited about expanding our relationship with INTEGRIS to develop and manufacture the DR Doppler system,” said SIMnext Executive Director Paul Pribaz. “Their strong commitment to the growth of Central Illinois and to working with us to create solutions that will further evolve healthcare simulation make them an ideal partner for this product.”
For more information on DR Doppler & SIMnext please visit: www.simnext.com.
INTEGRIS Group is primarily known for our engineering knowledge, however, we have a talented marketing team that works in conjunction with engineering to provide market research. We were approached to investigate a further push into an existing market and since we understood the engineering behind the product it made sense to keep this project at INTEGRIS. Our goal was to determine if there was a significant need for new or replacement grain transfer equipment throughout the Midwest. They had been dabbling the industry for about the past decade, but have not made great strides in acquiring market share and while they have learned from mistakes, they wanted to ensure the effort was proving to be fruitful both now and in the future. INTEGRIS agreed and we put together a market research portfolio analyzing both existing and future needs while being ever mindful of how to capture these markets as we learned about their potential needs.
We recently worked with Peoria, IL based SIMnext to engineer and develop the industry’s first dynamic ultrasound training solution: DR Doppler. DR Doppler provides clinicians and students with a variety of simulations of pathological blood flow that they might not be able to see in clinical practice, enabling them to stay current on their skills.
INTEGRIS has been involved from the early stages providing guidance from the initial prototype phase through product launch this week. The DR Doppler system required about 18 months of rigorous testing and multiple iterations of design to bring to market, through these iterations the INTEGRIS engineering team worked closely with the engineers of SIMnext to deliver an affordable, portable, dynamic ultrasound training device, like nothing else on the market.
Submitted by: Analysis Lead, Nick Jaegle
INTEGRIS’ engineers were presented the task to address failures encountered within an electromagnetic subsystem component serving as the clutch mechanism allowing selective power transmission to the other accessory systems. This subsystem is used in severe duty applications where reliability and predictable service life is crucial to staying profitable. The electromagnetic clutch had been experiencing a failure rate of over 5% on average. Initial attempts to reduce failures consisted of periodic tweaking of design and manufacturing parameters without a sound understanding of the system, resulting in the typical outcome of limited success and wasted dollars. We therefore suggested an Engineering Simulation and upon some rock solid clear and open communication (aka collaboration) with the customer they (the engineers) reviewed available design and field data, or lack thereof, determining that a torque overload condition was occurring stemming from an inadequate pull force produced from within the clutch. To make a long story short, the engineers determined a pull force increase of 15-20% will naturally eliminate these failures.
Blogging has become a huge marketing phenomenon over the last decade or so, and for good reasons. It helps establish a brand identity, display knowledge of a specific industry or many industries, share thoughts and opinions on relevant subjects, and the list goes on and on. Blogging helps share these thoughts and ideas to the world, having the ability to reach huge audiences. However, reaching those huge audiences is much easier said than done. Since my start at INTEGRIS, I have learned quite a bit about blogging and blog marketing, as it is something I had little experience with before working here. Now, we don’t have a blog audience of millions of people, but we are growing our audience more and more each month, which has been our main goal. So, that being said, I’m going to share 5 tips that I have picked up along my blog knowledge gaining journey that seem to continuously work for us. There are dozens of different approaches you can take when pumping out blog posts, but these 5 aspects I’m going to share with you are good to start with.
There are a lot of things that people don’t know about coding, myself included. However, since I’ve worked at INTEGRIS I have learned a lot more about it than I ever thought I would. And believe it or not, it’s actually pretty interesting! It’s easy to look at a line of code and think “This is dumb, it’s just mumbled words, letters, and numbers that have no meaning”. That’s exactly what I thought about it before I started dabbling in it a little bit, but I eventually realized that it does serve a purpose and a pretty important one at that. Now, believe me, I’m nowhere close to being a coding expert…more like a rookie novice who is still trying to earn a seat on the team bench. So that being said, this blog post won’t tell you how to code (remember, I’m a rookie), but it will highlight some of the areas of why coding is important not only in web and tech development but also where the future of coding is headed.
There are multiple different aspects that are involved in the product development process. This is something that INTEGRIS puts a lot of our energy and resources into when we tackle our client projects. Consumer demands are growing faster than ever and new product development is crucial in keeping up with those demands. Growth and development require a continuous stream of new ideas, product updates, and new category innovations.
