4 ms·
Germany manufactures a lot of things. I read an article once that said 30% of the BOM cost of iPhone went to Germany. It bothers me that we cannot replicate t
by mmmBacon 11y ago
Germany manufactures a lot of things. I read an article once that said 30% of the BOM cost of iPhone went to Germany. It bothers me that we cannot replicate their success here in the US. Surely we are just as capable.
- msandford 11y agoTechnically just as capable. Culturally? Not really. It's management that keeps the US from competing with Germany in that way, not engineering. How do you change the culture? I don't know.
- meatysnapper 11y agoThe US has almost no precision machinists. Those guys are in Germany, Swizterland and Japan. There are all sorts of things you can't build over here or in China because we don't have the people who can do it precisely enough.
- mmmBacon 11y agoI agree here. I recently worked on a project that required very tiny and optically precise injection molding and coating. Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers couldn't get close to making what we needed. There was a US manufacturer that could make the part but was very difficult to work with and they could not do all the process steps we needed. In the end, we went with a German company because they could do the precision machining required to meet our tolerances as well as the other process steps. Additionally, I often need to find precision materials or really high performance components and many times these are from German companies. Take the humble LED as an example, perhaps the most industry leading company in GaN LEDs is in Germany. Japanese can often offer the precision needed too but their companies are a lot less accessible and it takes a lot of time to build a relationship with them if you don't have one already. What they are really great at is that once you've built that relationship, they are usually very aggressive at supporting your needs. In Germany, I think some of it has to do with the fact that they have these government supported institutes for industrial research like HHI (Heinrich Hertz Institute). This allows them to find markets for new and risky technology and then transfer those innovations to industry.
- meatysnapper 11y agoYeah, the electronics slipped my mind. I was chatting with a sensor guy the other day, and he said by far and away the best stuff for a particular application he had was Bosch. Nothing from out east or the US could touch it.
- msandford 11y agoReally? I used to work with a world class guy in Houston. There are a lot of very talented people that work in the oilfield, but they're usually very busy.
- paulmd 11y agoYeah, German companies are typically managed in a much more bottom-up fashion than US companies. Labor isn't just an input to be managed, it's treated as an active player that can be cultivated to produce product improvements and gains from productivity/loyalty in the long term. This occasionally leads to some bizarre cultural "impedence mismatches". Volkswagen tried to organize a workers' council at their plant in Tennessee, and were rather dumbfounded at the blowback they received from both workers and politicians alike. The workers' councils are a normal part of their management process, they never figured it'd be a problem. Of course this is very much a case of "physician, heal thyself". There are tons of BS management practices in the tech world - stack-rank is the first thing that comes to mind. And big tech companies like FB and Google are known to be colluding to hold our wages down. We're skilled workers, overall we're a prime target for organizing. But we're notoriously hard to organize because of our culture, and it's really tough to see how to change that. Historically it's always been the case that workplace improvements are demanded, not given. The beatings will continue until morale improves, unless we act cohesively.
- maxerickson 11y agoThe US has a larger share of global manufacturing than Germany. Germany punches above its weight when you consider population though.