[HN Gopher] Is US Manufacturing the next tech boom?
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Is US Manufacturing the next tech boom?
Author : lloydarmbrust
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-02-09 18:38 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| tlack wrote:
| Another interesting development for US-based small scale
| manufacturing - LCD resin printers.
|
| * More reliable (fewer moving parts and only one element needs
| calibration)
|
| * Less expensive (just an LCD screen + Z axis)
|
| * Much faster to print (any number of parts that fit on the build
| plate print get printed at the same time)
|
| * More flexible materials (independent control over color and
| material properties)
|
| Interesting times ahead..
| lloydarmbrust wrote:
| Manufacturing is getting more and more specialized and lean.
| Which is good because the barrier to entry is lower which means
| the innovation will only go up.
| beauzero wrote:
| I thought a lot of base chemical production had moved to China
| and India? Is that not a barrier to entry for the US? We had them
| post WWII due to wartime production but it has slipped since.
| Sorry I am very interested but rather uninformed in this area.
| lloydarmbrust wrote:
| Yes it has. More expensive in the US because the environmental
| standards are much higher here... but that's exactly why there
| should be more of this type of production here.
| avgDev wrote:
| "Traditionally, manufacturers sell through retailers, group
| buying organizations and other middlemen, but times have
| changed." - this statement could not have been more wrong. There
| is a massive amount of manufacturers who sell directly to other
| manufacturers/companies.
| lloydarmbrust wrote:
| That's my point. Most manufactures are stuck in these giant
| slow enterprise-sales processes.
|
| When a hospital wants to buy from Armbrust, we send them to our
| shopify store, they can put in a PO and we ship same day. It's
| like bringing the internet to a world that's been using fax
| machines to communicate.
| avgDev wrote:
| They are not "stuck" in anything. Manufacturing is a lot more
| complex than a customer placing an order online and you
| shipping the next day. There is production planning, storage
| considerations, purchasing of raw materials, and the list
| goes on. Manufacturers use information from their customers
| to increase or decrease production.
|
| If I were to place an order for 1 million masks on your
| shopify store you would ship them the same day?
| eindiran wrote:
| Given how many manufacturers are using enormous, ungodly
| spreadsheets (that someone who's no longer at the company
| created back in 2002) to manage their manufacturing flow,
| many are pretty clearly "stuck" in old, rather shitty ways
| of doing things.
| contingencies wrote:
| I am beginning to manage physical production but come
| from a software background. While we don't use
| spreadsheets for production management (yet!), I want to
| explain why this is not insane.
|
| Spreadsheets seem backward to software people because we
| are confident with manipulating data with more flexible
| tools. We see them as backward primarily because they are
| batch-oriented and cannot easily handle distributed
| writes, elegant types, reflective programming,
| serialization, automated updates, etc.
|
| However, consider a small to medium scale manufacturer.
| They have millions of dollars invested in equipment. They
| have dedicated employees who know that equipment, its
| settings, its maintenance, and its operation. To those
| employees, software is a sideshow.
|
| Chances are, for any given manufacturing order there is
| going to be the following: pricing the order, sending out
| a quote, taking a downpayment, allotting or acquiring the
| raw materials, preprocessing, temporary storage of parts,
| scheduling the machine and operator time against other
| orders for all unit operations necessary, post-
| processing, final assembly or QA, consolidating and
| packaging, actual shipping, settlement.
|
| Can you see how batch-oriented processing actually makes
| reasonable sense for this sort of scenario? Going real
| time is quaint but if it doesn't buy you anything and you
| need to hire "$oftwarEUR-dEURv$" to create and maintain
| interfaces that still require human input and have less
| familiarity to your very-busy-operators than a simple
| spreadsheet - why not use a spreadsheet? It's cheaper,
| faster, more familiar (read: less errors, ~no training
| required) and therefore from a business standpoint more
| effective.
| rectang wrote:
| Spreadsheets are the right answer for small manufacturers
| who don't have overqualified developers hanging around
| and willing to work for below market rate.
|
| If at some point the manufacturer gets big enough to
| outgrow spreadsheets, there are plenty of well
| established upgrade paths.
| eindiran wrote:
| Regarding small, batch-oriented manufacturing; I am sure
| you're right that spreadsheets are better suited for that
| domain. But there are plenty of moderately-sized, batch-
| oriented factories or continuous-flow manufacturers that
| are using spreadsheets as well, and I don't think the
| technique is nearly as well suited there.
|
| To clarify, my problem isn't with spreadsheets as a tool
| in general: my problem is that spreadsheets are powerful
| enough to do this particular job even for larger
| factories, but not powerful enough to do it without
| quickly becoming 10,000 layers of accreted, fossilized
| spaghetti. If the process is illegible to everyone who
| manages the factory, using the spreadsheet is akin to
| divination by tea leaves: dump your numbers into the
| sheet and hope that you can interpret the right action
| from it.
|
| Restated: it seems to me that spreadsheets are often
| taken well-past their limits as an effective tool in the
| management of factories, and nobody seems to notice that
| its happening until its too late.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Overseas manufacturing is based on arbitrage of lack of caring
| about human rights and ecological regulation, and a lack of a
| proper carbon tax on the transport.
|
| Tariffs are a universal evil of economics, but if on-the-ground
| economic policy won't account for human rights and long term
| ecological preservation and the survival of the species, then
| I'll take a crude equivalence and a boost to domestic
| manufacturing.
|
| They just need to be instituted gradually.
|
| But worry not libertarians of HackerNews, that'll NEVER happen.
| Missing quarterly stock price targets so your options cash will
| always take precedence over the survival of the species.
| sjcoles wrote:
| > Overseas manufacturing is based on arbitrage of lack of
| caring about human rights and ecological regulation, and a lack
| of a proper carbon tax on the transport.
|
| Yup. Many US made products are US assembled. The constituent
| components are still produced with slave labor and reckless
| abandon for the environment. There are some regulations around
| made in the usa vs assembled in the usa but they are minimal.
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