If there's one story that's been beaten to death by the media in search of feel-good news from what’s been a pretty tepid economic recovery, it's that of the supposed manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.
Novelis, a leader in aluminum rolling and recycling, has opened what it calls the world’s largest aluminum recycling center. Located adjacent to the company’s rolling mill in Nachterstedt, Germany, the $258m (€200m) recycling center will process up to 400,000 metric tons of aluminum scrap annually, turning it back into high-value aluminum ingots to feed the company’s European manufacturing network.
Flextronics International Inc., a multinational company offering design, manufacturing, distribution and aftermarket services to original equipment manufacturers, won the 10th Annual Supply Chain Innovation Award at the yearly conference of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, held this year in San Antonio.
Nearly one in three migrant workers in Malaysia’s thriving electronics industry toils under forced labor conditions, essentially trapped in the job, a factory monitoring group found in a report issued Wednesday.
Many people look at end use parts as the nirvana of 3-D printing. But what's really interesting about 3-D printing is not how it's augmenting the way things are done traditionally. It's the way designers are utilizing 3-D printing as a new paradigm to help design a new kind of object.
Few decisions have as much power to make or break a product's success and profitability as those around the sourcing of direct materials. The components, parts and assemblies that go into making products not only account for 70 percent of an average manufacturer's annual spend, they have a significant impact on such critical competitive factors as brand reputation, time to market and supply chain reliability.
The year is 2017. Nearly every one of the 120 million households in the U.S. has its own multicolor 3DC3 printer with a C3 bath (a C3H6O finishing tank). The president of the United States officially announces a total end to consumer imports of plastic goods.
Forging a revolution in thought, application and process, the expansion policies set into place across the country have spurred a new environment in manufacturing – one which is set to renew what we know of industry, change the way we produce goods and spark innovations of intellect and function across many sectors as well as society as a whole. If there's any other definition necessary for a renaissance, we don't know of one.
Additive manufacturing - AKA 3D printing - is one of eight major technologies that will drive companies and business models in the future to either adapt or die, according to a Goldman Sachs report entitled The Search for Creative Destruction. However, 3D printing is still very much in its infancy, and fails to match the requirements of big businesses aiming to improve upon existing products and processes.
The manufacturing world is entering an era of hyper-innovation where advances in technology and material science are rapidly changing what we consider "possible" and creating new business opportunities along the way.