White House shines spotlight on manufacturing

Today the White House announced some executive actions aimed at the manufacturing community. It’s a sprawling announcement encompassing various areas of government. It's a buffet of initiatives to spur growth in what has become one of the hottest areas of the U.S. economy. Who could have predicted this during the depths of the Great Recession?

One high point comes from the Labor Department, which will launch a $100 million American Apprenticeship Grant Competition. According to a government statement, it aims to “spur new apprenticeship models and scale effective ones in high-growth fields like advanced manufacturing.”

Via the National Science Foundation, the government will establish several new manufacturing centers of excellence with the aim of tying together university and industry research. The Department of Energy plans to launch so-called “technology testbeds” to help small businesses gain access to cutting-edge manufacturing technologies.

The Commerce Department also plans to wade in deeper with Manufacturing Day, an event organized by various industry associations, including the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, International. According to a White House statement, “Next year, the Department of Commerce and its partners plan to further expand the number of Manufacturing Day events across the country and the number of people participating in Manufacturing Day.”

The government also will spend $300 million in emerging technologies, including new materials and advanced sensors for manufacturing. Investments in sensors caught my eye.

When you walk in any custom fabrication environment these days, one thing separates the best from the rest: access to useful information. How long is a machine changeover time, from the last good part of the previous job to the first good part of the next job? How long does work-in-process sit between machines? How long does it take for raw stock to turn into a finished product to arrive at the customer’s doorstep? How is a machine performing, and will it require maintenance soon? How have machines performed historically? How does their productive time compare with nonproductive time, including unplanned downtime?

Modern custom fabricators must deal with mountains of information, and they juggle it all in a high-product-mix environment with varying levels of demand. Gathering the right information is half the battle, and the other half is interpreting it to get the best bang for a shop’s improvement buck. In all of this, sensors and software are playing starring roles.