Now, computers, networks and analytics are making the value of manufacturing work low value.
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The manufacturing work order is approved by another manager and then entered into a legacy ERP system.
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And the third point he made is that we must end the incentives for companies to send manufacturing work offshore.
Right now, some of the most advanced manufacturing work in America is being done right here in upstate New York.
Shares of companies that do outsourced electronic manufacturing work crashed hard but have come off of the market bottom with gusto.
But, taking a page from other manufacturers, Apple now relies on others to do most of the nuts and bolts manufacturing work.
Their plan: to create a "virtual car company" that would farm out most of the design, engineering and manufacturing work for the V-12 to outside suppliers.
Their plan: to create a "virtual car company" that would farm out most of the design, engineering and manufacturing work for the powerful V-12 to outside suppliers.
Overall, the combination of new practices has significantly transformed manufacturing in the U.S. Today, much of the manufacturing work that remains is high valued added and increasingly requires skilled labor.
We learned this long ago in the U.S. and it resulted in major U.S. corporations offshoring repetitive, manufacturing work or upgrading it through technology to the point where it became skilled work.
There have been dark hints from people at Boeing that manufacturing work on the Sonic Cruiser, a high-speed airliner, will move out of the state unless traffic between Boeing's factories around Seattle gets unclogged.
The result has been a boom in high-skilled manufacturing work--with a projected 10% rise in such jobs over the next year--and a steady increase in real wages, an average 2.4% a year (after inflation) over the last three years.
I'm still mixing it up in the manufacturing, the work room, the sampling room.
This type of manufacturing and crafts work is today a key connection between the global city and the global slum.
In Wisconsin, a company called Orion is putting hundreds of people to work manufacturing energy-efficient lights in a once-shuttered plant.
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The new National Network for Manufacturing Innovation will work to leverage new investment from industry, state and local government, and the research community.
Folks are now back to work manufacturing these enormous new towers and blades for some of the most sophisticated, high-tech wind turbines on the planet.
Today, it is alive and humming with more than 600 employees at work manufacturing some of the most advanced blades for wind turbines in the world.
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Intel and International Business Machines have joined the parade of technology companies making alternative-energy plays, announcing Monday separate efforts to put their manufacturing smarts to work cranking out solar cells.
This close collaboration between cluster work and manufacturing is one helpful way to ensure that we keep making things in Ohio.
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Lilly also has to work out manufacturing issues that have slowed some of its new drugs on the path to market.
Sure, there are people who work in manufacturing but by and large, the heyday of the manufacturing industry here in the U.S. is gone.
Mr. Szabo still says he wants to go back to work in manufacturing, in the field of training and development, and continues sending out resumes.
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At the same time, Northwest gets an early look at Honda's product plans, so it can work out manufacturing issues with Honda's engineers well in advance.
The damage to the power grid in Japan caused some disruptions in work and manufacturing even for businesses that were not in the heaviest damaged areas.
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In a sense, StreamWork applies the Lean Manufacturing concept of standardizing work to the process of decision making, which makes a variety of continuous improvement processes possible.
"People in China have this view that they do all the hard work of manufacturing, and the margin gets taken by the people with the brands, " says Chao.
Last fall, Deputy Secretary of Labor Seth Harris visited the Pilgrim Screw Corporation, a fastener manufacturing firm that used work sharing to avoid laying off 35 workers in their Rhode Island facility.
But that increase, while welcome for those workers who now have a job, barely changes the larger trend: 11.8 million Americans work in manufacturing today, down 40% from peak manufacturing employment in June 1979.
Mr. Woo, the Hon Hai spokesman, said labor expenses aren't a major cost for Foxconn and that the more important question was whether China's younger workers will continue to have the desire to work difficult manufacturing jobs.
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