Jul 21, 2016

By Arun Jain, VP of Siemens Industry, Inc. , Manufacturing Business Technology “Remaining competitive” takes on many meanings, depending on your location in the world, but here are some thoughts on how American manufacturers can do it better today. By the time you finish reading this column, another entrepreneur will have figured out a way to make it happen for his or her company. Time-to-market reduction is as critical today as ever. Shorter innovation cycles, the result of new product lifecycle management software and services available to companies both big and small, mean the savvy product companies can take their concept and make it fly in just a fraction of the time spent in the past — and by “past,” I mean compared to about ten years ago. With the recent, rapid expansion of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) capability, much more functionality can be built into a product today and this means the manufacturing community must be even more flexible and responsive, not merely reactive, than ever before. With the “big data” impact that has resulted from the above scenario, the manufacturer is challenged in many ways, not the least of which is the daunting task of deciphering the important or exceptional from the nominal. A quality ERP or MES system can tell you what you need to know, but the key is the determining factors that make up the inputs to these systems and how their priorities are set. From my perspective in the motion control world, where customers task us with the control, generation or application of movement on everything from a machine tool to a packaging line, from a chemical processing plant to a printing plant, we see a great variety of needs among OEMs as well as end-users in these various segments. All of them require flexibility and often highly-customized solutions to their manufacturing or processing challenges. Plus, maintaining high productivity on aging equipment is a constant concern for every American company. Do they need to retrofit their existing machine or invest in a new one? Are enhanced robotics and transfer mechanisms or more personnel required on the line? Should the focus be on better asset management or an entirely...

Sep 10, 2015

“$15 Minimum Wage Threatens 5.3 Million US Manufacturing Jobs” By Tim Worstall, Forbes It’s a standard part of the current public policy discourse that raising the minimum wage won’t have much, if indeed any, effect on the number of jobs available to Americans to do. It’s easy enough to show that most of those earning the current minimum wage are in the fast food and restaurant industry, or in other very local services like home helps and so on. These jobs simply cannot be offshored in any manner so we don’t have to worry about international competition nor wage rates in other countries. Those jobs could still be at risk from automation of course, but not from direct competition from other labour elsewhere. This is a great deal less true when we look at the effects of a $15 minimum wage. My sometimes Forbes colleague, Adam Ozimek, makes this point over at Moody’s: This data suggest that if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour across the U.S., it would impact a significant number of manufacturing workers, with some states being hit harder than others. This reflects the fact that lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour would not just be quantitatively larger than previous U.S. experience, but qualitatively different in that it would affect a different set of workers and industries. Leisure/hospitality and retail make up 54% of the workers who make less than $8 an hour, but only 34% of those making less than $15 an hour. As the minimum wage rises it affects other sectors. For manufacturing, at least, the effect is likely to be greater. The point being that there’s three ways that manufacturing jobs can be affected by an increased minimum wage. One, like the service jobs, is simply that employers automate more or try other ways of simply using less labour. But there’s two more which affect manufacturing in a manner that services are not subject to. The first is of course that the employer might just up and offshore the plant. At any one time it’s always a delicate balance between whether to do that or not: it’s pretty simple to ship goods around these...

Jul 24, 2015

By Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires, Forbes Manufacturing may no longer drive the U.S. economy, but industrial growth remains a powerful force in many regions of the country. Industrial employment has surged over the past five years, with the sector adding some 855,000 new jobs, a 7.5% expansion. Several factors are driving this trend, including rising wages in China, the energy boom and a growing need to respond more quickly to local customer demand and the changing marketplace. To generate our rankings of the best places for manufacturing jobs, we evaluated the 373 metropolitan statistical areas for which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data over the past decade. Our rankings factor in manufacturing employment growth over the long term (2003-14), medium term (2009-14) and the last two years, as well as momentum. The Rust Belt Is Back No part of America suffered more from the de-industrialization of the past 40 years than the Great Lakes states. Yet as manufacturing  has come back, particularly the auto industry, many of the region’s economies have begun to resurge. Despite all the fashionable chatter over the question of whether we’ve reached “peak car,” the auto industry has enjoyed six straight years of increased sales, driven by low interest rates, the need to replace older cars and rising consumer confidence. The epicenter of this trend is exactly where the industrial decline hit hardest: Michigan, which sweeps the top three places on our list of the big cities generating the most new manufacturing jobs. The state has now recovered about 40% of the manufacturing jobs it lost during the recession. The Detroit-Dearborn-Livonia metropolitan area ranks No. 1 among the country’s 70 largest metropolitan areas for manufacturing employment growth over the time period for our study. Since 2009 the Detroit area has seen a remarkable 31.3% rebound to 89,300 industrial jobs, including a 9.8% expansion last year. This growth has helped begin to reverse a long-standing decline in employment overall—still down 12.3% since 2003—with overall employment up 5.9% since 2009. Detroit’s recovery is not just a matter of inertia, but reflects a unique combination of circumstances. The area is home not only to many skilled workers, but boasts the second largest concentration...

Jun 4, 2015

By HeadlightData.com “Fastest Growing Manufacturing Metros of 2014: Two-thirds of US metros increased their manufacturing job base in 2014; Merced-CA, Danville-IL and Flint-MI grew the fastest while Detroit, Dallas, and San Jose created the most new manufacturing jobs” Final revised numbers for 2014 (Jan. ’14 – Jan. ’15) show that 212 (66%) of 322 metros grew their manufacturing employment base. The fastest growing manufacturing metros stretch across multiple states – California, Illinois, Michigan, Alabama, Texas, Kentucky, and New Jersey.     On a net job creation basis, Detroit created the most new manufacturing jobs in 2014 – nearly 18,000 jobs. Dallas, San Jose, Minneapolis, and Houston each created more than 5,000 new manufacturing jobs. New York City shed the most manufacturing jobs (-5,100), followed by New Orleans (-1,700), El Centro-CA (-1,300), Modesto-CA (-1,200) and Phoenix (-1,100).     Click here to download a spreadsheet of the data for all metros: Manufacturing Employment Growth, 2014-2015 (Jan) for...

Mar 25, 2015

By Jacob Beningo, EDN Network There are few things more discouraging to an engineer than pouring their heart, sweat and tears into a project only to have it fail. Failure can and does provide insights and growth experiences to those involved but the loss of time and effort can strike a devastating blow. There are many reasons that an embedded systems project can fail but there are seven key indicators that a project is dying a slow and silent death. #7 – Team turnover  Every company experiences employee or contractor turn over but excessive turnover of key personal can be a leading indicator that a project is doomed for failure. There are many reasons why turnover can have a detrimental effect on the project. First, it has a psychological effect on other team members that can decrease productivity. Second, the loss of key personal can result in historical and critical information being lost forever, which will slow down the development. Finally, replacing team members requires training and bringing up to speed a new team member. This can be a distraction that takes others away from development work, with the end result an increase in development costs and delivery timeframe. #6 – Go stop go syndrome There is an old saying that children are taught; “Don’t cry wolf.” The saying is a warning to not raise false alarms. This warning is ignored in projects that have a “GO! STOP! GO!” cycle. A manager, client, or some other entity pushes his team hard, claiming that the project has to get out the door by a certain date. Developers work weekends and put in extra effort. Then, just as quickly as the big push came the project is stopped dead in its tracks. Months later it is once again an emergency. “Hurry we have to ship by X!” And the same thing happens again. The repeated urgency followed by stopping the project that is later urgently started again has a psychological effect on the development team. The developers come to no longer believe that there is any urgency. In fact, they start to get the mindset that this project isn’t a serious project and that it will...