Current State of Manufacturing

The 2019 Manufacturing and Logistics National Report shows how each state ranks among its peers in several areas of the economy that underlie the success of manufacturing and logistics. These specific measures include: manufacturing and logistics industry health, human capital, cost of worker benefits, diversification of the industries, state-level productivity and innovation, expected fiscal liability, tax climate, and global reach.

This report is the result of a collaboration between members of the World Economic Forum Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Production. It summarizes the main findings of work conducted on the application of advanced manufacturing and digital technologies on future production and supply-chain models. The applications set out in this paper highlight the importance of collaborations across supply-chain.

In this article, Deloitte discusses how smart factory initiatives could have a significant impact on manufacturing productivity.

For manufacturing enterprises, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape the source of value creation, the formation of new business models, and the delivery of value-added services such as mass customization, predictive maintenance, and “product servitization”. As AI becomes more prevalent in various aspects of business management and operations, investing in people will become even more important.

This policy memo focuses on one major economic argument in favor of increased infrastructure investment—that it would increase demand for American manufactured goods and, in turn, generate American manufacturing jobs. As this memo shows, more jobs will be created if policymakers take steps to reduce the yawning U.S. trade deficit that allows jobs to “leak” outside the U.S. economy as U.S. spending increases.

This MForesight report identifies fundamental weaknesses in U.S. manufacturing and the risks these weaknesses pose for long-term wealth and security. It emphasizes the need for concerted national action to rebuild and restore manufacturing skills, capabilities, and productive capacity. The problems have developed over decades but have become worse with time, now reaching the point where we have lost the ability to scale emerging technologies because of a weak industrial commons.

The glory days of American manufacturing in the 1970s—when workers with a high school diploma or less held 79% of the industry’s jobs—will not return. By 2016, these workers made up just 43% of the manufacturing workforce. Upskilling and Downsizing in American Manufacturing finds that workers with postsecondary now outnumber workers with a high school diploma or less in manufacturing. 

The Way We Were: The Changing Geography of US Manufacturing from 1940 to 2016 explores how manufacturing has lost ground in many places and is now the largest employer in only two states.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution—Industry 4.0—calls into question the very definition of manufacturing, blurring the lines between tangible and intangible, digital and physical, product and service. At its core, Industry 4.0 redefines how manufacturers derive and deliver value. According to BDO’s 2019 Middle Market Industry 4.0 Benchmarking Survey, 99 percent of middle market manufacturing executives today are at least moderately familiar with Industry 4.0.

Smart manufacturing depends critically on information governance: rules (formal and informal) concerning the collection, flow, and analysis of information, often in digital form. To explore information governance issues in depth, the Manufacturing Policy Initiative at Indiana University hosted a roundtable event in Washington, DC, with executives from nearly 20 manufacturers. Policy experts from academia were asked to contribute to papers on specific topics including AI in manufacturing.

Many companies are piloting Fourth Industrial Revolution initiatives in manufacturing, but few have managed to integrate Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies at scale to realize significant economic and financial benefits. The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, scanned more than 1,000 leading manufacturers. Subsequent outreach enabled visits to the most advanced sites and identification of the few factories that are true guiding lights.