MetalForming Xtra Feature

Survey Looks at Global Manufacturing Cost Competitiveness
The Boston Consulting Group has analyzed manufacturing costs for the world’s 25 leading exporting economies, based on four core areas: wages, productivity, energy costs and exchange rates. Some of the findings, addressed in the firm’s report, are quite enlightening. Among them:

• China’s manufacturing-cost advantage over the United States has shrunk to less than 5 percent.
• Among the countries losing ground, largely due to weak productivity growth, are Italy and Sweden.
• Four countries poised to become future manufacturing leaders within their regions are India, Indonesia, the Netherlands and the UK.
• The two countries called “rising global stars”—Mexico and, yes, the United States.

> Seven Instances when Additive Manufacturing Can Disrupt Existing Processes
In a recent Chicago Tribune article, William King, CTO at the public-private partnership UI Labs, an initiative funded in part by several Midwest manufacturers, says:

“Manufacturing companies are tracking and using data like never before. Over the next decade, manufacturing will become completely digital. Factories will be run from tablet computers, and every machine tool in every factory will be connected to the Internet.”

At the head of the digital-manufacturing evolution is additive manufacturing (AM), and the article goes on to discuss the “next frontier” for additive manufacturing, citing seven manufacturing circumstances that will justify the use of AM. Among them:

• Parts built in low volumes or that have high fixed costs associated with them;
• Special parts that have long lead times;
• Parts with high inventory-storage costs, where on-demand manufacturing of smaller batches makes sense; and
• When the unique capabilities of AM processes allow reduced part count, by increasing part complexity (GE’s much publicized fuel nozzle, for example, combining 19 machined parts into two AM parts).