Robotics, AI and 3D printing could close UK's productivity gap
Angela Monaghan for The Guardian: Expanding hi-tech manufacturing is vital to the UK staying competitive, says Siemens UK boss Juergen Maier
Why Germany Still Has So Many Middle-Class Manufacturing Jobs
Hermann Simon for Harvard Business Review: Only about 1.1% of the world population is German. However, 48% of the mid-sized world market leaders come from Germany.
More production, more jobs? CMU pitches businesses on robotics in manufacturing
Daniel Moore, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our mission, at a very high level, is establishing leadership in this area," said Gary Fedder, interim CEO of the ARM Institute. "We want to lower the barrier for the companies to adopt this technology" while also "empowering the American worker" to find open positions.
GE Launches Brilliant Skills Curriculum to Train Workers for Digital Industrial Future
GE announced today a proprietary skills curriculum to train global supply chain employees for new, highly valuable jobs needed in our digital industrial economy. This new initiative will focus on lean, advanced, additive and digital manufacturing. Built on GE's Brilliant Factory strategy, which uses big data, software, sensors, controllers and robotics to increase productivity, 'Brilliant Learning' is designed for GE's global supply chain employees but will also be available to all employees, in multiple languages across all levels of manufacturing roles.
GE Launches Brilliant Skills Curriculum to Train Workers for Digital Industrial Future
Proprietary curriculum 'Brilliant Learning will seek to train more than 150,000 global supply chain employees to fill gaps in Digital Industrial Workforce
A3 to Kick Off Automate 2017 with White Paper on Jobs in the Automation Age
The white paper explores the impact of automation on the ever-evolving job market and the growing shortage of skilled employees with experience and training in advanced technologies. A3 examines the types of jobs that are going unfilled and reviews workforce development initiatives, including education, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training that will fill labor shortages and support ongoing economic growth and productivity.
Staying Rich Without Manufacturing Will Be Hard
Noah Smith for Bloomberg View: Discussions about manufacturing tend to get very contentious. Many economists and commentators believe that theres nothing inherently special about making things and that efforts to restore U.S. manufacturing to its former glory reek of industrial policy, protectionism, mercantilism and antiquated thinking.
Mnuchin on robots taking US jobs: 'It's not even on our radar screen ... 50-100 more years' away
David Reid for CNBC: U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was not worried about the mass displacement of U.S. workers by robots and could be a century before a labor crisis eventuates. "It's not even on our radar screen ... 50-100 more years," Mnuchin said.
Japan worker shortage has only one winner so far: robots
Leo Lewis for Financial Times: Earlier this week, Japanese TV audiences glimpsed a potentially revolutionary contraption from the Matsue College of Technology that rapidly separates closed shijimi clamshells into those with a live mollusc inside and those without.
Cut to footage of a human sorter, expertly performing the same function at a rate of just 90 kgs of shijimi per day and whose job this machine seems destined to replace. In other parts of the world, the juxtaposition could seem cruel or politically charged; in Japan, it is almost celebratory. The great conundrum for investors — and increasing preoccupation of sellside analysts attempting to talk clients out of underweight Japan positions — is whether the equity market provides a neat play on Japan’s deepening worker shortage and the promised surge in wages that has to date been all gong and no dinner. Cont'd...
Hot Jobs Study Reports Manufacturing a Top Industry
For entry level manufacturing positions, higher education is not normally required. Instead, a personal and commercial drivers license, and special certifications such as an Occupational Safety & Health Administration Certification, Food Safety Program education, and HAZMAT endorsement, can make a candidate more qualified when applying to manufacturing jobs.
MakerBot is laying off a third of its staff, narrowing focus under Stratasys
Shawn Knight for TechSpot: 3D printing ordinary household goods may be able to save users a bit of coin but consumers aren’t buying it – literally – and that’s forcing one company to downsize its workforce.
In what is becoming a common occurrence, MakerBot recently announced additional restructuring that’ll see the company shed 30 percent of its staff.
CEO Nadav Goshen said greater focus on long-term goals is key to their success and to get there, they must reduce the “pressure and distraction” of chasing short-term market trends and focus on their core products.
The executive didn’t say which divisions would be hit hardest, nor do we know exactly how many employees are being let go although TechCrunch estimates the figure is probably between 80 and 100.
Specifically, MakerBot will be integrating hardware and software product development under one team that’ll be led by VP of Engineering Dave Veisz. Current Director of Digital Products, Lucas Levin, is also being promoted to VP of Product, we’re told, and will lead product management across hardware and software. Cont'd...
Closing US Manufacturing Trade Deficit Would Create 1.3M Jobs, Says Tech Think Tank
The prevailing narrative says automation was the main culprit behind U.S. manufacturing job losses in the early 2000s, and that automation is now powering an unprecedented manufacturing technology revolution that will continue to displace jobs. But a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) finds that both of these claims are false.
ITIF, a leading tech-policy think tank, finds that trade pressure and faltering U.S. competitiveness were responsible for more than two-thirds of the 5.7 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010. And rather than entering a "fourth industrial revolution," U.S. manufacturing productivity growth is actually near an all-time low. In light of these facts, ITIF concludes that U.S. policymakers should aim to close the country's trade deficit in manufactured goods by fighting foreign mercantilism and pursuing a national competitiveness agenda that hinges in part on boosting manufacturing productivity rates. The report estimates that successfully closing the manufacturing goods trade deficit this way would create 1.3 million jobs. Full Press Release:
Oerlikon expands additive manufacturing R&D and production capacity in the US
Oerlikon announced today that it is expanding its global additive manufacturing (AM) business with a state-of-the-art R&D and production facility for additively manufactured advanced components in the Charlotte metro area in North Carolina, USA. Oerlikon will invest around CHF55million in this facility in 2017 and 2018, and expects to create over 100 new jobs at this site over the longer term.
As part of Oerlikon's strategy to become a global powerhouse in surface solutions and advanced materials, the Group has identified additional growth areas such as additive manufacturing, which leverages its strong materials heritage, service reputation, access to markets, applications across industries and core competence in intelligently engineering and processing advanced materials and surface technologies. Full Press Release:
U.S. investors see more automation, not jobs, under Trump administration
David Randall for Reuters: When U.S. President-elect Donald Trump criticized United Technologies Corp's (UTX.N) Carrier unit in November for its plan to move some 800 jobs to Mexico, the parent-company made a swift decision to keep the factory in Indiana.
Yet, the move did not translate into saving jobs. Instead, the company decided it would move toward automation as a way to cut costs.
"We're going to make up [the] $16 million investment in that factory in Indianapolis to automate, to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive," chief executive Greg Hayes said on CNBC last month. "What that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs."
Swapping robots and software for human labor has underpinned much of the productivity gains in the United States over the last 25 years. Now, with a greater political push to keep factories at home, investors are betting that automation will gain speed in industries ranging from auto manufacturing to chicken processing to craft beer breweries. Cont'd...
Chiefs hold back on smart factories after backlash
Peggy Hollinger for Financial Times: General Electric, one of the world’s biggest industrial companies, estimates that digitising industrial machinery, networks and processes will not just bring down the costs of manufacturing. The data it generates will open new business opportunities, such as optimising maintenance schedules for customers or improving the design and quality of products. The resulting “industrial internet”, GE argues, has the potential to deliver global productivity improvements that could add $10tn-15tn to global GDP over 20 years.
No manufacturer can ignore the coming revolution. Yet many, in developed economies at least, are wary. A backlash against globalisation, fuelled by decades of decline in America’s rust belt and the erosion of blue-collar jobs, has already upset the status quo in the US, where Donald Trump’s protectionist slogans helped him to win the White House.
Almost half the 1,370 chief executives questioned in PwC’s annual Global CEO survey published this week fear that this latest industrial revolution will feed further distrust among their companies’ stakeholders — whether they be investors, employees or the wider public. Cont'd...
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