Looking Back – Learning from a challenging 2023
While Wabtec as a whole has had a strong year, the Freight Equipment business has faced many challenges. We faced a work stoppage in Erie, encountered instability in material availability, and saw a drop in on-time delivery percentage. We worked hard to mitigate those difficulties, resulting in us meeting our customer needs, but 2023 was a difficult financial year. Here, Justin Downs, Group Vice President Operations — Freight Equipment, discusses what we faced this year as well as what to expect from Wabtec in 2024.
The year’s challenges came from many different directions. Justin says, “We faced a number of different obstacles this year, whether they were industry changes, material availability, or Mod challenges. We haven’t seen that in a long time. You tack that on to everything else we do day to day and it’s become a real challenge to be able to get stuff out the door.”
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THE MOON MAN
After running away from his job raising and lowering the moon, a man must come to terms with his responsibility to his planet and to himself.
EXT. THE MOON - MORNING
Open on a desolate prairie. Not a tree sprouting out of the gravel covered crust. There are mountains, but they are far. There is black and white and every kind of grey in between, nothing else.
Open on a desolate prairie. Not a tree sprouting out of the gravel covered crust. There are mountains, but they are far. There is black and white and every kind of grey in between, nothing else.
Closer to the ground there is a hut. It's small and shabby. It used to be a space ship. The MOON MAN steps out. He is dark skinned and well kept; he's very strong and is growing a thin beard. He looks at the mountains and then the ground. He looks at his toes in the gravel.
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POWERED BY ENSONO - SIZZLE REEL SCRIPT
Open on an early morning run at the park.
VOICE OVER
Every day, Ensono supports companies that make a positive difference in the world.
Cut to a breast cancer survivor enjoying the light of a new day.
VOICE OVER
Think about all the breast cancer survivors who’ve benefited from the University of Sheffield’s research.
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A spotlight on the Beautiful Brains community group
April is Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month, so we’re highlighting our community group for neurodiverse associates and those with neurodiverse family members. The Beautiful Brains community group is an open, safe space for all associates to ask questions, share tips, and socialize. Here, one of the group’s sponsors, Bryony Berry, Lead Consultant - Business Strategist, discusses how you can get involved.
Beautiful Brains was created to offer a community for our neurodiverse associates. “There is often a low-level background noise of stress associated with feeling different in a group of people.” Bryony says, “This community helps to reduce this by highlighting that neurodiverse people are not isolated, or need not be, because they have a community in which they are not different.”
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Redesigning NetX Image Repository
Georgia Tech’s NetX image portal is intended to function as a large database of assets that Georgia Tech affiliates can modify and share across their relevant platforms. However, the database’s unintuitive information architecture and asset categorization prevents it from wide use among the greater Georgia Tech community.
As student researchers working with GT Institute Communications in conjunction with LMC 3411, our focus is to better understand how users expect to navigate a large image database.
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THE RIGHT INTERNAL CHANNELS FOR YOUR AUDIENCE
Just like any other audience, employees will engage and interact differently with various types of media. Knowing when to use a video or a podcast can increase employee viewership and engagement – strengthening your internal communication channels.
For more on the theoretical side of communication channels check out this video summarizing The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan. For the purposes of internal communication, follow these guidelines when deciding what medium to use.
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ILLMATIC AND ITS 90’S MEDIA RELEVANCE
Nas’ debut album Illmatic is widely regarded as the greatest hip hop album of all time. It tells the story of a boy suffocated by the precariousness of his environment. At the time of Illmatic’s release, New York hip hop was struggling to keep up with record sales and the album ushered in a new sound that focused on the roots of the genre.
By and large, the media painted rap as a genre rife with up and coming business moguls and gang activity which was growing tiresome in the eyes of the consumer. Nas, however, painted a picture of a much more grounded New York. Illmatic created a space of influence for itself through its themes, innovation of Hip Hop, and reversal of the common media narrative.
By and large, the media painted rap as a genre rife with up and coming business moguls and gang activity which was growing tiresome in the eyes of the consumer. Nas, however, painted a picture of a much more grounded New York. Illmatic created a space of influence for itself through its themes, innovation of Hip Hop, and reversal of the common media narrative.
