Not dead — yet.  Manufacturing in the U.S. is ours to lose.
A guest editorial by Paul Studebaker, CMRP, Editor in Chief, Plant Services

Paul Studebaker has had a long and distinguished career in both publishing and materials engineering sciences.

A Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP), he holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Materials Science from the University of Illinois. He joined Putman Media Co. in 1993, and is now Editor in Chief of Plant Services magazine.

He has won the prestigious Jesse H. Neal award for editorial excellence from American Business Media, the highest journalism award given by the business-to-business press community. He may be reached at (630) 467-1300 or pstudebaker@putman.net.

Yes, a disconcerting number of products are now imported, and many of them are no longer the second-rate goods we had come to expect from the third world. A surprising amount are built to U.S. specifications — indeed, on U.S. tooling — and bear familiar brand names we’d once thought would always mean “Made in USA.”

But despite those imports and the popular attitude that it’s a dead man walking, manufacturing in the U.S. is not shrinking — it’s actually growing apace with gross domestic product (GDP). At his ISA Show keynote speech in October, Kevin Roach, chairman of MESA and vice president of Rockwell Automation, emphasized that manufacturing is realizing outstanding growth and is “really very healthy in the U.S.” Factory orders are trending up and growth is putting pressure on raw materials and capacity. Seventy percent of companies are at or above 80% of capacity, and capital spending has rebounded with 53% percent of U.S. plants planning to expand.

ARC Advisory Group recently reported that, according to the November Manufacturing ISM Report on Business, economic activity in the manufacturing sector grew in November for the 30th consecutive month, while the overall economy grew for the 49th consecutive month. ISM’s is no narrow index — it draws from industries including apparel, rubber and plastic products, electronic components and equipment, tobacco, textiles, primary metals, food, paper, chemicals, industrial and commercial equipment and computers, instruments and photographic equipment, furniture, transportation, fabricated metals, printing and publishing, and glass, stone and aggregate.

The challenge for us is to keep U.S. manufacturing thriving despite low-cost foreign competition in a country that seems, frankly, to not give a damn. Our labor isn’t cheap, so the key is ever higher levels of efficiency through automation, information technology and knowledge management, and that means keeping, attracting, training and rewarding the technologists who can make it work. These are the subjects of Plant Services magazine and our web site www.plantservices.com.

Of course, along with talented engineers, skilled workers and focused managers, competitive U.S. plants require the best possible components. Every year for our February issue, Plant Services asks readers to name the vendors that supply the highest value — the combination of performance, durability, low maintenance, energy efficiency and purchase price that add up to the lowest lifecycle cost — in more than 60 categories of industrial products, equipment, supplies and services. Plant professionals are asked to name just one supplier in each category where they have personal experience, and the survey is fill-in-the-blank, so there’s no prompting. In a remarkable and increasing number of cases, rather than the manufacturer or brand, end users are writing in the name of their most valued distributor.

Good distributors have always been and will remain critical links in the chains that bring the right components to specific applications. They bring end users single-source capabilities and local representation, combined with high-volume pricing and the power to choose the best suppliers. But today’s best distributors go beyond supplying the right stuff. Plant managers, engineers and maintenance supervisors want and need to be able to rely on them for an increasing role in making their plants more reliable and efficient, so they’re coming into plants with the ability to streamline on-site inventories, provide engineering services, install and service what they sell, and solve the most difficult reliability problems.

And that’s exactly what U.S. manufacturing needs for them to do.