MAPI — Manufacturers Alliance News and Reports — Manufacturing Strategy Survey and More

Issues in the Brief

Manufacturing Strategy Survey
MAPI recently polled members of the Manufacturing Council to understand what other manufacturers perceive as the current state and future needs of their manufacturing processes to ensure competitiveness over the next five to 15 years.  The survey was broke down into two parts, current state and future state.  Some of the key findings are as follows:

The Power of Going Digital: Q&A With Siemens’ Raj Batra
In this interview, Siemens Digital Factory President Raj Batra describes how digitalization helps attract new talent, argues that simulations of production will become the “largest productivity driver in manufacturing” and explains how going digital can be game-changing. To learn more about making your digital enterprise a reality, register for the May 24-25 MAPI Executive Summit in Chicago, where Raj will present on this key evolution within manufacturing.

Lowering the Bar: Hurdle Rates
Hurdle rates, which help guide investment decisions, have declined on average over the past five years. Decreases in the cost of debt and expected returns on equities largely explain this decline.

The Disconnect Between Supply Management and the Business
Few supply management leaders think that their businesses’ management teams appreciate the potential of modern supply management. Business leaders disagree.

Infographic: A New Model for Manufacturing’s Multiplier Effect
While traditional measurement methods suggest that manufacturing is responsible for only 11% of U.S. GDP, my recent research reveals this is not the case.

Economic Update

Productivity Dynamics in U.S. Manufacturing
Productivity growth in the computer and electronic products subsector, once the principal driver of productivity performance in the manufacturing sector, has experienced significant waning in recent years. Consequently, the U.S. manufacturing productivity outlook has become murky. This is a challenging trend for our society, because increased productivity growth helps lift living standards. The good news is that empirical evidence put forth in this paper shows that innovation and capital investment play a key role in accelerating multifactor productivity growth (i.e., output per unit of a combined set of inputs including labor, materials, and capital) in a wide range of manufacturing industries.

Time to Restore a Balanced, Rules-Based Multilateral Trading System
The rules-based multilateral trade and financial system created at Bretton Woods in 1944 has been crumbling over the past decade. The WTO trading system to reduce trade barriers on a reciprocal, most-favored-nation basis has been replaced by a spreading network of bilateral and regional preferential trade agreements. And far more threatening, the IMF financial system, centered on convertible, non-manipulated exchange rates, has been undermined by rampant exchange rate mercantilism, principally by China and other Asian nations.

Economic Update [Video] : Productivity Dynamics in U.S. Manufacturing
In this seven-minute video, Cliff describes his analysis of US manufacturing productivity growth, reveals industry rankings for labor productivity growth and discusses how industries’ interconnected performance can inform policy efforts to stimulate growth.

Quarterly Forecast for U.S. Economic and Manufacturing Growth
Slides from Chief Economist Dan Meckstroth’s discussion of the overall outlook for the U.S. economy, with particular emphasis on the manufacturing sector, for 2016 and 2017.