“Q&A: AMT's Pat McGibbon on the Evolution of Industrial Tech” |
| Q&A: AMT's Pat McGibbon on the Evolution of Industrial Tech Posted: 21 Sep 2010 10:12 AM PDT At IMTS 2010, we sat down for a conversation with Patrick McGibbon, VP of Strategic Information and Research at the Association for Manufacturing Technology, which sponsors the biannual show. In this Q&A, he gives us a history lesson on industrial tech. Last week marked the 28th edition of the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), one of the largest industrial trade shows in the world. Every even-numbered year in Chicago, industrial professionals from all over the world attend IMTS to check out the tens of thousands of new machine tools, controls, components, software, systems and processes that can help them improve their efficiency. They gain valuable ideas and insights from more than 1,000 of the world's leading equipment producers. They come to look, and they come to buy. At IMTS 2010, IMT sat down for a conversation with Pat McGibbon, Vice President of Strategic Information and Research at the Association for Manufacturing Technology, which sponsors the biannual show. McGibbon oversees the production of benchmarking surveys for manufacturing technology, as well as the development and maintenance of AMT members' market intelligence database. In this Q&A, McGibbon he lays out how the evolution of the IMTS show reflects the evolution of the industry itself. IMT: Having worked in the manufacturing industry for some time, and as a key member of AMT, what do you see as the biggest changes in manufacturing on the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) floor this year? PM: In two years, we've gone from a couple of examples of additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping around the floor, and one inside the emerging technology center, to having a whole pavilion on the subject. And nanotechnology: going from a couple of people who dealt with the issue to seeing half a dozen this year; by 2012 we'll probably see a pavilion that deals with the nano issue. In our annual meeting right after the 2006 show, we had [computer pioneer] Dave Patterson as one of our key speakers. He got up and talked about interconnectivity: basically, plugging any printer into your computer and making it print. He said, and I paraphrase, "You guys have been so productive, fostered so many changes in the technology, most of them all mechanical, improving accuracies, thermodynamic compensation — and that's all fantastic. But you guys are missing a huge and easy function: interoperability, the ability to have things plug-and-play and collect data from any source and bring it back and use it to understand the next thing that's going to happen, project what's going to happen, anticipate what you're going to need to do, and develop processes and programs that are based on information about what the machine is telling you in real-time." He said this could be done in two years. Sure enough, in 2008, we had about half a dozen companies up and already running MTConnect, the open communications protocol standard for interconnectivity among devices, equipment and higher-level applications — which was up and running in less than two years. And today, we are seeing fights amongst the people who are on MTConnect who want their machines on the board. [laughs] Some of the major aerospace companies actually require it as a concept on the machines they purchase for producing both commercial and military aircraft; we've also got some people in the medical industry requiring it as a standard, as well. It's all about collecting information in real-time and being able to use that information to make the adjustments and changes necessary to improve productivity and throughput. So, I'd say nano, additive manufacturing and the rapid expansion of MTConnect on more machines across the floor are probably the three [major] changes between 2008 and 2010. IMT: As this is the 28th edition of IMTS, what kind of long-term developments would you say have taken place since the show's inception? PM: There are, of course, some technologies that didn't even exist. Waterjet cutting, you know, was used to make diapers in the '70s and '80s. Today manufacturers are cutting granite and two inches of steel with this stuff. It's a versatile cutting tool, and the improvement came in the nozzles. Lasers, around since the '60s, really took off in the late '80s and have become an integral part of the forming industry. So, lasers are coming into their own, waterjet machinery is coming into its own and EDM [electrical discharge machining] is really taking off, particularly the wire EDM products. And then you talk spindle machines. You know, in the '70s, milling machines were the big thing. In the early '80s, it was machining centers. Today we're talking about the multi-functioning machines, the machines that can do multiple functions at the same time, and you never have to remove the part, which reduces error in set-up and adjustments and reduces time in moving the part from one place to the other. To me, these are among the huge changes that have occurred in technology. IMT: How would you say technology has affected everyday work? Is there a downside to the improvements? PM: We all talk about jobs, and while there have been many job losses over the course of the last two or three years, a large part of the decline in manufacturing employment between 1980 and 1995 has to do with the productivity of the machines. Manufacturing was still growing, but the machines that people would buy to make things in the United States to offset the labor costs were becoming that much more productive. Manufacturing has grown at a pretty stiff rate, anywhere from 3 percent to 7 percent over the course of the last 30 years; at the same time, employment in manufacturing, the production workers in manufacturing industries, was relatively flat or slightly down. So, fewer workers are making more things. Unless we take more of our market share back from imports, there's not going to be job growth through manufacturing. The reason is to keep manufacturing here, people who do these things have got to find ways to offset labor costs. And part of that is because the percentage of labor that goes into U.S.-made products has dropped dramatically; it's dropped to less than 10 percent now. Think about that; If labor was 18 percent to 25 percent back in those times, they've taken three-quarters of the labor costs out [...] if they don't keep up, then their labor advantage begins to erode fairly quickly. One of the toughest labor markets in terms of competition is China. Their manufacturers don't sit on their thumbs. They continue to stay closely behind the changes that are being made in Western cultures to make their people more prevalent. We're taking about the 2004-2006 period, [when the U.S. lost] 2 million manufacturing jobs. China lost 35 million manufacturing jobs, and that was partly because of the downturn, but mostly because of productivity improvement — huge ones that just lopped off large sums of people who work by hand. If there's a downside, it's that manufacturing productivity can help reduce the amount of labor, and that does have an impact on jobs. But what my point would be is that if we did a better job selling our products here and overseas, there'd be more manufacturing to do and more jobs available for achieving that.
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