Top Plant, Product of the Year entry applications on Website

There are less than two months left before nominations close for PLANT ENGINEERING 's two programs honoring the best in manufacturing.

Application forms for the 19th annual Product of the Year competition and the third annual Top Plant award are now available online at www.plantengineering.com.

Also available on the home page are stories about Hewlett Packard and S&C Electric, winners of the 2004 Top Plant award, as well as DaimlerChrysler, the 2005 winner. Also featured on the Website is all the Product of the Year winners from the past two years. Receiving these awards meant a lot to the 2005 recipients.

There will be two new categories when the 2006 Product of the Year finalists appear in the November issue of PLANT ENGINEERING . The Material Handling category was expanded to include both Material Handling Systems and Manual Material Handling, and the Software category now was split to include Maintenance Software and Productivity Software.

“The expanded categories reflect changes in the industry. This also gives us a better chance to honor more of the best innovations in plant floor products,” said PLANT ENGINEERING editor Bob Vavra.

Entry deadline for the 2006 Product of the Year competition is Sept. 8, 2006. All entries will be juried, and the 150 finalists will be presented to PLANT ENGINEERING 's readers for their consideration. The three products in each category that receive the most reader votes will get the gold, silver and bronze trophies, and the single largest vote-getter from all products receives the Grand Award.

The Top Plant entry deadline is Sept. 1. All entrants will receive benchmarking information from all applications received, and the winner or winners will be featured in the December 2006 issue of PLANT ENGINEERING .

For information, contact editor Bob Vavra at bob.vavra@reedbusiness.com or go to the Website at www.plantengineering.com .