History is full of information about the glory days of the industrial revolution in the United States when factories were churning out manufactured goods at phenomenal rates for the times. Automation and mass production technologies were nowhere near the technologies available today and yet manufactured goods from America were the at the top of the list of preferences by consumers both domestically and abroad. This excellence in manufacturing for the time period from the late 1800s to the 1970s, was not limited to any one sub sector of the manufacturing arena such as power generation equipment or automotive applications, but encompassing the entire gamut of the field including but not limited to automotive, power generation, printing, textiles, oil drilling, ship building, aerospace, heavy construction equipment and the like. And to feed this ever hungry manufacturing sector that needed raw materials, mining and metallurgical engineering industries were thriving in full gear. Maytag and General Electric could not make washing machines and refrigerators fast enough for the world wide demand for American manufactured goods and the Cadillac and Lincoln were the choice of the wealthy at home and abroad. Those were the glory days of manufacturing in the United States. But then what happened?
Look around and everyone knows the struggle of the manufacturing sector in America in recent times. You do not need to be a rocket scientist or an astrophysicist to decipher that a major portion of consumer goods such as televisions, camcorders, automobiles, computers and printers, shoes, textiles, toys and the like are manufactured abroad. Industrial castings, pumps, motors, machine tools, bearings, chains, sprockets, tools and cutters are heavily manufactured overseas. And this shift to overseas manufacturing is not limited low technology products such as man hole covers, which incidentally comes for the most part from India, but also to more sophisticated consumer electronics such as televisions and personal computers from China, Taiwan and Malaysia and aerospace components from eastern Europe, China and Korea and automotive components and units from Japan, Mexico and Brazil. The decline of the U.S. manufacturing industry is thus very evident.
It is the market forces that have determined that it is more effective to purchase these manufactured goods from overseas sources than to manufacture them domestically. The common perception is that it is the corporate high level management alone with its short term focus that is responsible for the shift to overseas manufacturing based simply on the lower labor rates. That is only one reason for this situation. After all, if there was more profit to be made by leaving the manufacturing domestically, would they not shift accordingly? With the situation the way it is, with the tide of overseas manufacturing rising every day, can the U.S. manufacturing industry regain its once evident leadership at all or is it simply going to go down even further perpetually? That is the billion dollar question. Are factories better off simply shutting their doors and moving elsewhere? What can be done and what resources are needed and what mind set is required if the tide has to be reversed? Is there any hope for a revival and are there any clues from history? Are there any answers? These burning questions are on the minds of manufacturing engineers, technicians and executives all over America.
The author invites you to explore his attempts at answers to these questions in his two part article series in the business section of http://articlewonders.com
