At the market to buy a steak, and there it is: gleaming and red, wrapped hermetically in saran and styrofoam, labeled to inform me what it is, and to provide tracability in case, lord forbid, it needs to be recalled.
I don't have the faintest idea what efforts it took to deliver that steak.
When I tell people that I'm in manufacturing, I'm generally greeted with a blank stare and a "oh, that's nice" that I reserve for someone who tells me that some celebrity I've never heard of broke up with her boyfriend. Most Americans -- only 12% work in manufacturing now -- are so divorced from the means of making stuff that they never give a thought to that widget they just bought except to hope the damn thing works. Usually, it does.
Most Americans also think that manufacturing in this country is dead. They don't know that the value of goods manufactured in the US has risen consistently over the years, albeit interrupted by various recessions. What they do know, almost by default, is that fewer and fewer Americans work in manufacturing.
A hundred years ago, more than a third of the country's workers were engaged in agriculture; today, that figure is 3%, and they feed all of us and a good chunk of the world. In 1970, about a third of the US workforce was in manufacturing; that figure is down by two-thirds since. In both cases, it's called productivity, and it's also about added value -- higher quality, more features and a lower labor content per unit out.
Many people also have a distorted view of what US manufacturing involves. The picture is generally of hot, dank factories populated by scads of unskilled workers turning lug nuts or driving forklifts. But today's factories are bright, sharp and clean, the workers are more technicians, and the technology is just amazing. One of the projects in my company involves measuring the width of the product to a thousandth of an inch, several times a second, 48 at a time, and the first time we turned it on, we damn near blew up the server. Workers are expected to be knowledgeable and to contribute to decisions, often using data gathered right from the machines.
There is opportunity in manufacturing. I went into it because I wanted to see something tangible for my efforts, and now I also enjoy the less tangible rewards: helping workers with their work and their lives, developing strategies, researching and pushing our technologies. But it is a tough slog, especially for American manufacturers; the competition is international and brutal, the customers demanding, the information systems complicated and the regulation stifling. American manufacturers are on a journey, not at a destination, and the journey is a never-ending push to add value, improve quality, lower cost, abandon commodity markets and invest into markets that offer more promise. Oh, and we have to make a buck, too.
Manufacturing is different from most jobs in that it's a 24/7 enterprise and you never know what you'll walk into each day. The pace of learning is incredible and the pressure intense. And it's a perspective that seems to be missing from the national discourse; not only is it a weak sister deserving only the obligatory lip service when the pols pontificate on "issues of national importance", but the learnings that have been forced into those of us in the business seem not have translated into a meaningful set of lessons for the country. And so, to that end:
1. It begins and ends with people: if you get great people, challenge them, teach them, guide and motivate, the job -- any job-- becomes one hell of a lot easier.
2. There is no tradeoff between quality and productivity. In fact, they are mutually reinforcing.
3. If you don't measure it, you can't improve it.
4. There are many kinds of waste -- money, time, material, moving stuff around, and more -- and huge opportunities, in fact whole industries, are in those waste streams.
5. Business isn't about perfection. It's about optimization.
6. You get lots of resources to play with, and money is the easiest to obtain. Time is the only resource that is fixed and thus demands the most intense management. Ideas, on the other hand, are free.
Now: Are you ready to talk with your kids about exploring manufacturing as a career?
~P0TUS
August 4, 2013
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ReplyDeleteAre the 'industries in the waste streams' working to reduce the waste, or do they have a vested interest in making sure the waste continues because that's what they make their money off of?
ReplyDeleteVested interests that encourage waste don't pay off for long, because soon enough some other business will make an honest endeavor of it. Money can be made easily enough; for example, in recycling waste materials.
ReplyDeleteWhen you add in the US Corporate Tax Rate (what of it is paid is still higher then most foreign countries), the impossibility of finding those skilled workers, because our schools are so very very underfunded and managed so poorly, that you have to obtain the raw materials you need from a foreign country because we don't make that anymore, Japan makes it cheaper... It is a wonder that any manufacturing is accomplished here at all. As I read you blog I think of the words of our POTUS (real) Education! We need to make this a priority. Awesome post, potus (real fake) :)
ReplyDeleteI'll have a separate post sometime on the implications of the changes in US manufacturing for our educational system.
ReplyDeleteHave worked for money since I was about nine (times have changed), but my first real, paid by a company job was in manufacturing, making stuff, labor intensive and low tech. I was 16, and chose the night shift because that shift was a half hour shorter, and paid ten cents more an hour - $1.70, not the usual $1.60. It was hot, dirty, relatively dangerous, but completing satisfying - we made stuff, and you could see every night what we made. One the best summers ever. Thanks for your blog.
ReplyDeleteGood stuff there. One of my early jobs was dumping plastic pellets into a hopper to feed a plastic bag blown film line. Same deal...
ReplyDeleteI am a professional recruiter in the manufacturing industries and, accordingly, a huge booster of American Manufacturing. One of our greatest and oldest client has just made a $250 mm investment in expanding its flagship plant about 2 hours from where I live -- a godsend, FINALLY, after 6 years of contraction, hanging on for deal life and clawing our way back (and being forced to buy crappy Chinese for products for total lack of an American alternative).
ReplyDeleteUh oh, I got started.
Our failure in the US to invest in education -- especially math, science and engineering -- and our insane insistence upon saddling students/graduates with crippling debt has dug us into a hole that I don't know if we'll ever be able to climb out of. But hope springs eternal.
Goldman Sachs' manipulation of the price and availability of materials for manufacturing, i.e., aluminum, via horizontal and vertical monopolistic practices, is absolutely criminal. They must be stopped.
Oh how I could go on. Glad to know you are out here.
One of the things that maddens me is how little our pols understand about manufacturing. They bleat on about reviving manufacturing without having a clue of what's involved. Your points are right on... I will be posting more on this in the future.
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