California Small Manufacturers See Increased Sales

Southern California small manufacturers reported an overall $243 million increase in sales in the previous year, as a result of implementing changes recommended through consulting services provided by the California Manufacturing Technology Consulting under the federal Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program. When including the sales impact due to needed beneficial improvements, an additional $377 million in retained sales was noted, for a combined total of $620 million. An independent third party compiled the results in a survey between June 2007 and May 2008.

The survey results are from 500 companies receiving services and show an encouraging picture of small manufacturers’ ability to be successful:

· $620 million increased and retained sales

· $114 million in cost savings

· $88 million invested in plant and equipment

· 5,426 created and retained jobs

Source: RP News Wires

Manufacturers Turn to IT to Beat Downturn

IT will be a key factor in the ability of manufacturing companies to cope with a downturn by enabling them to cut costs, build longer and more complex supply chains and respond faster to changing demand. Technology already underpins the move to offshore and demand-led production by making it possible for manufacturers to communicate with far-flung suppliers, manage shorter product lifecycles and collaborate more effectively with business partners.

 

ARC Advisory Group, a manufacturing technology specialist, recently completed a worldwide enterprise IT survey into how manufacturing companies will be spending their IT budgets in the coming year. Top of users’ shopping lists are systems to support supply chain processes, followed by technology to run their manufacturing operations better.

 

A hot topic among manufacturers, according to ACR, is analytics—software containing algorithms for analyzing manufacturing processes. Previously expensive analytical software, affordable by only the biggest companies, has got a lot cheaper. But its wider application has brought the problem of information overload. Business analysts struggle to interpret the flood of data now available to them.

 

Source: Computerweekly.com

Inc. Asks: Is Manufacturing Weighing Down the U.S. Economy?

Ever since Inc. started ranking the Best Cities for Doing Business in 2004, the bottom rung of the rankings has been largely dominated by older industrial cities where factories have long been abandoned and once booming economies have dried up. The 2008 list bears this sobering fact: among the largest regions surveyed, Detroit sits on the bottom at No. 66, with Warren Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., Cleveland, Providence, R.I., Philadelphia, and the New York twins—Rochester and Buffalo—doing only slightly better.

 

So given this persistent underperformance, is manufacturing weighing down the U.S. economy? The answer may surprise you.

 

Even though the industrial towns dominated by what used to be called the Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) and their suppliers have been devastated by slumping sales, a host of other manufacturing regions have emerged as strong performers. For the most part, the largest beneficiaries of these changes are located either in the Intermountain West–the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, and the Sun Belt region stretching across the southern bottom of the country. Here, U.S. carmakers are not well represented and smaller communities with a host of specialized industrial companies have expanded in the face of tough times.

 

Source: Inc. Magazine

Manufacturers Take Note: Tax Deductions Going Green

High energy costs, an unprecedented level of government mandates for green building, heightened demand for green construction, and improvements and better pricing for environmentally sustainable materials have many building owners, architects, and facility managers considering significant updates to save cash. Sec. 179D of the IRS Code provides a significant deduction for the cost of energy-efficient improvements to commercial property.

With an estimated 4.5 million existing commercial properties in the U.S. and with 14 percent of U.S. cities with populations of at least 50,000 having mandated green standards for new commercial buildings and dozens more poised to follow, the 179D tax deduction could help mitigate the average 3-7 percent cost difference in building green.

Source: BusinessWire

German Industry Tools Up to Face Global Slowdown

Falling orders, a strong euro, and high oil prices have put Germany’s manufacturers in a tight spot, but they are responding to the challenge and are better placed to handle the global slowdown than their euro zone peers.

The recent news flow from the manufacturing sector has made for grim reading: orders fell for the sixth month in a row in May, when industry output and manufacturing sales also fell.

Add to the slew of weak data news that industrial conglomerate Siemens plans to cut some four percent of its workforce worldwide, and the picture appears to darken.

However, the Siemens example shows that German companies are taking steps to shape up. Widespread restructuring in recent years prepared German manufacturers well for the global economic slowdown—a trend many are responding to with fresh cost cuts.

Source: Reuters

Minority of Manufacturing Companies See Their Business as Thriving

 

Economic concerns driven by accelerating inflation in energy and commodity costs have drastically eroded confidence in most manufacturing and wholesale distribution segments in the U.S., according to the RSM McGladrey 2008 Manufacturing and Wholesale Distribution (MWD) National Survey.

 

Overall, business conditions for most industries responding to the survey have eroded since 2006. Only 38 percent of 2008 survey respondents describe their business as “thriving and growing”–nearly 20 percent fewer than in 2006. This negative view extends to economic conditions. Nearly 80 percent of respondents were pessimistic about prospects for the U.S. economy–an increase from the previous two survey years.

 

Concerns about inflation contribute significantly to these declines. More than 80 percent of companies in the survey expect cost increases exceeding six percent in energy, raw materials, operating labor, freight, and benefits. Health care costs once again are projected to increase on an average exceeding 10 percent–meaning that health benefit expenses have tripled since the 2006 survey.

 

Source: IndustryWeek

EASTEC 2008 Brings Together Manufacturing’s Generations

EASTEC 2008, the East Coast’s largest annual manufacturing event, recently brought together generation “now” and “next” of manufacturing buyers and practitioners. Held in West Springfield, Mass., this Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ event attracted some 14,000 decision makers representing a variety of industries.

While years and experience may separate these generations, the technology presented at EASTEC is a unifying factor. These groups checked out the latest and greatest technologies. In particular, generation “now” focused on making multimillion dollar purchases, as generation “next,” or hundreds of local high school students, participated in activities designed to give them a real-world glimpse of all things right-now, hot, and above all, high-tech.

This year’s strong attendance indicated that despite a gloomy U.S. economy, there remains a more optimistic outlook for buying the latest technologies and machines in the name of greater productivity.

Source: ThomasNet

NanoGram’s Solar Cell Manufacturing Process Wins DOE Award

A laser-based silicon-deposition technique developed by NanoGram Corporation (Milpitas, CA) for solar cell manufacturing has won an Energy Innovator Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The process reduces solar cell cost to the level of thin-film photovoltaics while delivering high efficiency, according to NanoGram.

Making crystalline silicon solar cells normally involves drawing boules of single-crystal silicon from a crucible full of molten silicon–a delicate and expensive process. Wafers are then sliced from the boule and then made into the finished product. What NanoGram has developed instead is a laser reactive-deposition technique that grows silicon crystals in a more-direct approach, reducing silicon consumption by more than a factor of four. Cost reductions generated using this approach are expected by NanoGram to bring solar cell module costs well below a dollar a watt by the time high-volume manufacturing production levels are reached in 2012.

An R&D pilot plant is currently under construction at NanoGram’s headquarter facilities.

Source: Laser Focus World

Discovery May Lead to Faster, More Powerful Processors

Researchers at Princeton Universityreported that they have found a way to literally melt away miniscule defects in computer chips, a discovery that could help manufacturers build more powerful processors.

As chips get smaller and smaller, tiny defects in shapes, lines and dots that are etched into them can ruin performance. By getting rid of the tiny flaws, chip makers could create even smaller and more powerful processors, which, in turn, could mean smaller and more powerful devices. The process, which the inventors call Self-Perfection by Liquefaction, is designed to melt the structures on the chip in a fraction of a millionth of a second—  just long enough for the resulting flow of liquid to be guided so it re-solidifies into the proper shapes.

The next step for the Princeton researchers will be to try out this new technique on 8-in. wafers.

 Source: ComputerWorld.com