Manufacturing

• 1. Introduction

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  Manufacturing turns raw material from the primary sector into finished goods on a large scale. The word itself carries its oldest meaning inside it. It likely descends from the Middle French manufacture, meaning the process of making, which traces back to the Classical Latin manu, meaning hand. Its earliest recorded use in English appeared in the mid-16th century, and back then it described the making of products by hand. So how did a word rooted in handwork come to name vast factories full of machines? The answer runs across more than two million years, from a sharp stone struck off a core to a single fixture machining fifteen engine blocks at once. Along the way it touches captured papermakers, electrified mason jars, and a quiet method born in Japan in the 1930s. It also reaches into questions of strategy, of cost and quality, and of which nations now produce the most. Some industries do not even call it manufacturing. Semiconductor and steel producers use the word fabrication instead.

• 2. Sharpened Stone

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  Human ancestors were manufacturing objects with stone and other tools long before Homo sapiens emerged about 200,000 years ago. The earliest known method, called the Oldowan industry, dates back at least 2.3 million years. The earliest direct evidence of tool usage was found in Ethiopia, within the Great Rift Valley, dating back 2.5 million years. The method itself was elegantly simple. A core of hard stone with good flaking properties, such as flint, was struck with a hammerstone. This produced sharp edges, mostly choppers or scrapers, which let early humans shape further tools from softer bone and wood. Around 300,000 years ago, the Middle Paleolithic brought the prepared-core technique, where many blades could be rapidly formed from one core. Pressure flaking, in which a wood, bone, or antler punch shaped stone very finely, arrived in the Upper Paleolithic about 40,000 years ago. During the Neolithic, people polished tools from hard rocks such as flint, jade, jadeite, and greenstone. Those polished axes worked alongside knives, scrapers, and projectiles, plus tools made from wood, bone, and antler. The next leap would not be a sharper stone. It would be a hotter fire.

• 3. Fire And Metal

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  Copper smelting is believed to have begun once the pottery kiln could reach high enough temperatures. In copper ore deposits, the concentration of elements such as arsenic increases with depth, and smelting those ores yields arsenical bronze. That arsenical bronze could be work-hardened enough to make tools. True tin bronze, an alloy of copper with tin, spread slowly because tin appears in relatively few deposits globally. During the Bronze Age, bronze improved on stone for its strength and ductility, and because it could be cast in molds into intricate shapes. Bronze even reshaped shipbuilding. Bronze nails replaced the older method of lashing hull boards together with cord woven through drilled holes. The Iron Age is defined by the widespread making of weapons and tools from iron and steel rather than bronze. Iron smelting is harder than tin or copper smelting, because smelted iron needs hot-working and melts only in specially designed furnaces. The exact place and time iron smelting was discovered remains unknown. Part of the difficulty is telling metal drawn from nickel-bearing ores apart from hot-worked meteoritic iron. As civilizations grew, manufacturing advances seeded new technologies, and one of them would roll.

• 4. Wheels And Mills

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  Several of the six classic simple machines were invented in Mesopotamia, and the Mesopotamians have been credited with inventing the wheel. The wheel and axle mechanism first appeared as the potter's wheel, in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, during the 5th millennium BC. In Egypt, paper made from papyrus and pottery were mass-produced and exported across the Mediterranean basin. Early Ancient Egyptian construction relied on bricks made mainly of clay, sand, silt, and other minerals. Centuries later, the Middle Ages brought new inventions and new ways of managing traditional production. Papermaking, a 2nd-century Chinese technology, reached the Middle East in the 8th century when a group of Chinese papermakers were captured. It spread into Europe through the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, and a paper mill was established in Sicily in the 12th century. In Europe, the pulp fiber came from linen and cotton rags. Lynn Townsend White Jr. credited the spinning wheel with increasing the supply of rags, which produced cheap paper, a factor in the development of printing. The blast furnace, used in China since the 4th century BC, came into widespread use in France in the mid 15th century because of cannon casting. Then came a machine that multiplied a single worker tenfold. The stocking frame, invented in 1598, raised a knitter's knots per minute from 100 to 1000.

• 5. The Machine Age

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  From 1760 to the 1830s, manufacturing in Europe and the United States moved from hand production to machines. This Industrial Revolution brought new chemical and iron processes, more steam and water power, machine tools, and the mechanized factory system. It also drove an unprecedented rise in population growth. Textiles led the way, dominant in employment, value of output, and capital invested, and the first industry to use modern production methods. Rapid industrialization began in Britain with mechanized spinning in the 1780s, and high growth in steam power and iron production came after 1800. Mechanized textile production spread to continental Europe and the United States in the early 19th century. Centers of textiles, iron, and coal rose in Belgium and the United States, and later textiles in France. Growth did not run smoothly. An economic recession ran from the late 1830s to the early 1840s, as early innovations like mechanized spinning and weaving slowed and their markets matured. Locomotives, steamboats, steamships, hot blast iron smelting, and the electrical telegraph spread in the 1840s and 1850s, but were not powerful enough to drive high growth. Rapid growth resumed after 1870 in the Second Industrial Revolution, bringing new steel making, mass-production, assembly lines, and electrical grid systems. Building on better vacuum pumps and materials research, incandescent light bulbs became practical in the late 1870s, letting factories run second and third shifts. Shoe production mechanized in the mid 19th century, and bicycle mass production began in the 1880s.

• 6. Electrified Mass Production

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  Around 1900, the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company electrified its mason jar plant in Muncie, Indiana, and the everyday object became the showcase for mass production. Glass blowing machines replaced 210 craftsman glass blowers and their helpers. A small electric truck now moved 150 dozen bottles at a time, where hand trucks had carried only 6 dozen. Electric mixers replaced men shoveling sand into the glass furnace, and an electric overhead crane replaced 36 day laborers moving heavy loads. Electrification of factories, which began gradually in the 1890s after the practical DC and AC motors arrived, was fastest between 1900 and 1930. Central station electric utilities and falling electricity prices from 1914 to 1917 helped it along. Electric motors needed less maintenance than line shafts and belts, and many factories saw output rise by 30%. In the late 1910s and 1920s, Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company popularized mass production by adding electric motors to chain or sequential production. Ford bought and built special purpose machine tools, including multiple spindle drill presses that drilled every hole on one side of an engine block in a single operation. A multiple head milling machine could machine 15 engine blocks at once on one fixture. Production of the Ford Model T used 32,000 machine tools.

• 7. Lean And World-Class

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  Lean manufacturing, also known as just-in-time manufacturing, was developed in Japan in the 1930s. Its aim is to cut times within the production system and response times from suppliers and to customers. It reached Australia in the 1950s through the British Motor Corporation Australia, at its Victoria Park plant in Sydney, and the idea later migrated to Toyota. The wider world learned of it in 1977, through two English-language articles. One called the methodology the Ohno system, after Taiichi Ohno, who was instrumental in its development within Toyota. The other, written by Toyota authors for an international journal, added more detail. Implementations followed, beginning in 1980 and quickly multiplying across the United States and other countries. A related idea, world-class manufacturing, stands for excellence in the field. Author Richard J. Schonberger promoted the term, though Flynn and colleagues note it was first used by R H Hayes and Steven C. Wheelwright before Schonberger took it up. These ideas raised a deeper question that managers had often dodged. What should a factory actually be good at?

• 8. Strategy And Cost

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  Five key dimensions define a traditional view of manufacturing strategy: cost, quality, dependability, flexibility, and innovation. Wickham Skinner, called the father of manufacturing strategy, argued for focus. A business cannot lead on all five dimensions, so it must select one or two competitive priorities. That idea produced the theory of trade offs. In 1987, Elizabeth Haas described delivering value to customers as lower prices, greater service responsiveness, or higher quality. The trade off theory was later debated. Colin New noted that by 1991 it had become somewhat fashionable to abandon the trade-off approach. Skinner wrote in 1992 that enthusiasm for manufacturing strategy was bursting out all over, in academic papers, executive courses, and case studies. Terry Hill observed that manufacturing is often seen as less strategic than marketing or finance, with managers coming late to strategy discussions and contributing only reactively. Ken Platts and Mike Gregory devised a manufacturing audit scheme to support strategy formulation, popularized in Competitive Manufacturing in 1998, with support from the UK's Department of Trade and Industry. Control strategies split into two methods. Push manufacturing builds to a forecast, so batch processing and lot sizes matter. Pull manufacturing focuses on replenishment, tying output to the next stage's demand in the value chain. From a financial view, the industry's goal is cost benefits per unit, which lowers prices and secures profit margins.

  Most manufacturing processes carry significant social and environmental costs, and sometimes the clean-up of hazardous waste outweighs the benefit of the product that created it. Hazardous materials can expose workers to health risks. Efforts to address these include improving efficiency, reducing waste, using industrial symbiosis, and eliminating harmful chemicals. These costs are also addressed legally. Developed countries regulate manufacturing through labor laws and environmental laws, and producers worldwide can face pollution taxes. Labor unions and craft guilds have historically negotiated worker rights and wages. The protections common in developed nations may be absent in the third world, and tort law and product liability add further costs. Together these dynamics have pushed manufacture-based industries, over recent decades, to relocate to developing-world economies where production costs run far lower. The scale of the loss is measurable. A total of 3.2 million U.S. manufacturing jobs, one in six, disappeared between 2000 and 2007. On the 26th of June 2009, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, urged the United States to raise manufacturing to 20% of the workforce, saying it had outsourced too much. According to UNIDO, China was the world's highest-output manufacturer in 2023, producing 28.7% of total global output, followed by the United States, Germany, Japan, and India. Germany topped the 2020 Competitive Industrial Performance Index, ahead of China, South Korea, the United States, and Japan. In 2023, U.S. manufacturing was 10.70% of national output and employed 8.41% of the workforce, reaching $2.5 trillion in value. Germany's output that year reached $844.93 billion, a 12.25% rise from 2022, employing about 5.5 million people, around 20.8% of its workforce.