5 ms·

Is US Manufacturing the next tech boom?

38 points by lloydarmbrust 6y ago

tlack 6y ago
Another interesting development for US-based small scale manufacturing - LCD resin printers. * More reliable (fewer moving parts and only one element needs calibration) * Less expensive (just an LCD screen + Z axis) * Much faster to print (any number of parts that fit on the build plate print get printed at the same time) * More flexible materials (independent control over color and material properties) Interesting times ahead..
- lloydarmbrust 6y ago
  Manufacturing is getting more and more specialized and lean. Which is good because the barrier to entry is lower which means the innovation will only go up.
beauzero 6y ago
I thought a lot of base chemical production had moved to China and India? Is that not a barrier to entry for the US? We had them post WWII due to wartime production but it has slipped since. Sorry I am very interested but rather uninformed in this area.
- lloydarmbrust 6y ago
  Yes it has. More expensive in the US because the environmental standards are much higher here... but that's exactly why there should be more of this type of production here.
avgDev 6y ago
"Traditionally, manufacturers sell through retailers, group buying organizations and other middlemen, but times have changed." - this statement could not have been more wrong. There is a massive amount of manufacturers who sell directly to other manufacturers/companies.
- lloydarmbrust 6y ago
  That's my point. Most manufactures are stuck in these giant slow enterprise-sales processes. When a hospital wants to buy from Armbrust, we send them to our shopify store, they can put in a PO and we ship same day. It's like bringing the internet to a world that's been using fax machines to communicate.
  - avgDev 6y ago
    They are not "stuck" in anything. Manufacturing is a lot more complex than a customer placing an order online and you shipping the next day. There is production planning, storage considerations, purchasing of raw materials, and the list goes on. Manufacturers use information from their customers to increase or decrease production. If I were to place an order for 1 million masks on your shopify store you would ship them the same day?
    - eindiran 6y ago
      Given how many manufacturers are using enormous, ungodly spreadsheets (that someone who's no longer at the company created back in 2002) to manage their manufacturing flow, many are pretty clearly "stuck" in old, rather shitty ways of doing things.
      - contingencies 6y ago
        I am beginning to manage physical production but come from a software background. While we don't use spreadsheets for production management (yet!), I want to explain why this is not insane. Spreadsheets seem backward to software people because we are confident with manipulating data with more flexible tools. We see them as backward primarily because they are batch-oriented and cannot easily handle distributed writes, elegant types, reflective programming, serialization, automated updates, etc. However, consider a small to medium scale manufacturer. They have millions of dollars invested in equipment. They have dedicated employees who know that equipment, its settings, its maintenance, and its operation. To those employees, software is a sideshow. Chances are, for any given manufacturing order there is going to be the following: pricing the order, sending out a quote, taking a downpayment, allotting or acquiring the raw materials, preprocessing, temporary storage of parts, scheduling the machine and operator time against other orders for all unit operations necessary, post-processing, final assembly or QA, consolidating and packaging, actual shipping, settlement. Can you see how batch-oriented processing actually makes reasonable sense for this sort of scenario? Going real time is quaint but if it doesn't buy you anything and you need to hire "$oftwar€-d€v$" to create and maintain interfaces that still require human input and have less familiarity to your very-busy-operators than a simple spreadsheet - why not use a spreadsheet? It's cheaper, faster, more familiar (read: less errors, ~no training required) and therefore from a business standpoint more effective.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Overseas manufacturing is based on arbitrage of lack of caring about human rights and ecological regulation, and a lack of a proper carbon tax on the transport. Tariffs are a universal evil of economics, but if on-the-ground economic policy won't account for human rights and long term ecological preservation and the survival of the species, then I'll take a crude equivalence and a boost to domestic manufacturing. They just need to be instituted gradually. But worry not libertarians of HackerNews, that'll NEVER happen. Missing quarterly stock price targets so your options cash will always take precedence over the survival of the species.
- sjcoles 6y ago
  > Overseas manufacturing is based on arbitrage of lack of caring about human rights and ecological regulation, and a lack of a proper carbon tax on the transport. Yup. Many US made products are US assembled. The constituent components are still produced with slave labor and reckless abandon for the environment. There are some regulations around made in the usa vs assembled in the usa but they are minimal.

38 points by lloydarmbrust 6y ago

Another interesting development for US-based small scale manufacturing - LCD resin printers. * More reliable (fewer moving parts and only one element needs calibration) * Less expensive (just an LCD screen + Z axis) * Much faster to print (any number of parts that fit on the build plate print get printed at the same time) * More flexible materials (independent control over color and material properties) Interesting times ahead..

lloydarmbrust 6y ago
Manufacturing is getting more and more specialized and lean. Which is good because the barrier to entry is lower which means the innovation will only go up.

beauzero 6y ago

I thought a lot of base chemical production had moved to China and India? Is that not a barrier to entry for the US? We had them post WWII due to wartime production but it has slipped since. Sorry I am very interested but rather uninformed in this area.

lloydarmbrust 6y ago
Yes it has. More expensive in the US because the environmental standards are much higher here... but that's exactly why there should be more of this type of production here.

avgDev 6y ago

"Traditionally, manufacturers sell through retailers, group buying organizations and other middlemen, but times have changed." - this statement could not have been more wrong. There is a massive amount of manufacturers who sell directly to other manufacturers/companies.

lloydarmbrust 6y ago
That's my point. Most manufactures are stuck in these giant slow enterprise-sales processes. When a hospital wants to buy from Armbrust, we send them to our shopify store, they can put in a PO and we ship same day. It's like bringing the internet to a world that's been using fax machines to communicate.
- avgDev 6y ago
  They are not "stuck" in anything. Manufacturing is a lot more complex than a customer placing an order online and you shipping the next day. There is production planning, storage considerations, purchasing of raw materials, and the list goes on. Manufacturers use information from their customers to increase or decrease production. If I were to place an order for 1 million masks on your shopify store you would ship them the same day?
  - eindiran 6y ago
    Given how many manufacturers are using enormous, ungodly spreadsheets (that someone who's no longer at the company created back in 2002) to manage their manufacturing flow, many are pretty clearly "stuck" in old, rather shitty ways of doing things.
    - contingencies 6y ago
      I am beginning to manage physical production but come from a software background. While we don't use spreadsheets for production management (yet!), I want to explain why this is not insane. Spreadsheets seem backward to software people because we are confident with manipulating data with more flexible tools. We see them as backward primarily because they are batch-oriented and cannot easily handle distributed writes, elegant types, reflective programming, serialization, automated updates, etc. However, consider a small to medium scale manufacturer. They have millions of dollars invested in equipment. They have dedicated employees who know that equipment, its settings, its maintenance, and its operation. To those employees, software is a sideshow. Chances are, for any given manufacturing order there is going to be the following: pricing the order, sending out a quote, taking a downpayment, allotting or acquiring the raw materials, preprocessing, temporary storage of parts, scheduling the machine and operator time against other orders for all unit operations necessary, post-processing, final assembly or QA, consolidating and packaging, actual shipping, settlement. Can you see how batch-oriented processing actually makes reasonable sense for this sort of scenario? Going real time is quaint but if it doesn't buy you anything and you need to hire "$oftwar€-d€v$" to create and maintain interfaces that still require human input and have less familiarity to your very-busy-operators than a simple spreadsheet - why not use a spreadsheet? It's cheaper, faster, more familiar (read: less errors, ~no training required) and therefore from a business standpoint more effective.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Overseas manufacturing is based on arbitrage of lack of caring about human rights and ecological regulation, and a lack of a proper carbon tax on the transport. Tariffs are a universal evil of economics, but if on-the-ground economic policy won't account for human rights and long term ecological preservation and the survival of the species, then I'll take a crude equivalence and a boost to domestic manufacturing. They just need to be instituted gradually. But worry not libertarians of HackerNews, that'll NEVER happen. Missing quarterly stock price targets so your options cash will always take precedence over the survival of the species.

sjcoles 6y ago
> Overseas manufacturing is based on arbitrage of lack of caring about human rights and ecological regulation, and a lack of a proper carbon tax on the transport. Yup. Many US made products are US assembled. The constituent components are still produced with slave labor and reckless abandon for the environment. There are some regulations around made in the usa vs assembled in the usa but they are minimal.