The Manufacturing Blog

The next manufacturing revolution has begun–and it’s being led by individuals, not multinational corporations. This manufacturing revolution is about empowering individuals with the same types of manufacturing capabilities that were once only available to large corporations. It’s about democratizing manufacturing.

A recent Deloitte report estimated that as many as 600,000 jobs U.S. manufacturing jobs are unfilled. Why? There’s a skills mismatch in the manufacturing industry. With unemployment sitting at 8.3 percent, this is cause for concern. Whatever the causes, we now need to work together as a nation to overcome the skills deficit.

Marc Halpern, Vice President of Gartner Manufacturing Industry Advisory Service, recently suggested that crowdsourcing could fix manufacturing. I caught up with Halpern to learn how crowdsourcing might work in the manufacturing industry, and what needs to happen to before it can gain widespread acceptance.

In an industry that relies heavily on word-of-mouth to acquire business, social media tools can help contract manufacturers and job shops stand out from the noise and gain a competitive advantage on a global scale to win new customers. In this article, I discuss how manufacturers should get started with social media.

Twitter and Facebook-like activity streams are making their way into manufacturing software. These social collaboration tools have the potential to democratize manufacturing by increasing information-sharing across shop floors and supply chains. Beyond that, these streams could revolutionize manufacturing software UIs.

There’s a long-standing tussle between manufacturing strategies. On one side is the philosophy that material requirements planning (MRP) software is required to adequately plan production. On the other side is the lean philosophy, which argues that these planning tools are too rigid to reflect actual production environments.

Job shops across the United States are trying to figure out how to beat the competition. While we all know there’s no panacea for the manufacturing industry, it never hurts to look at how others in the industry are succeeding. Toward that end, I recently caught up with four job shops that are thriving in the current economy.

In today’s competitive manufacturing environment, it’s more important than ever to use information technology to drive efficiencies. Deploying the right manufacturing software – either material requirements planning (MRP) or production planning and scheduling – is particularly important when it comes to planning.

Timing is everything. And this year’s Dreamforce conference, the annual Salesforce event that drew 45,000 people, saw an impeccable display of timing when the Kenandy launch took front and center stage. For those of you that might have missed it, Kenandy is the new manufacturing software kid on the block.

In my view, it seems like the twenty-something and younger crowd would sooner plan the next great civilization on Sims City rather than actually make it happen. We’re a generation that’s obsessed with being cool, and manufacturing doesn’t seem very cool. It got me thinking – can we make manufacturing cool again?