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THE COMPETITIVE EDGE: Research Priorities for U.S. Manufacturing
TABLE 1-2 Human Resource Requirements for Metal-Cutting Operations to Make the Same Number of Identical Parts
Conventional Systems
Flexible Manufacturing Systems
Operation
United States
Japan
Japan
Engineering
34
18
16
Manufacturing overhead
64
22
5
Fabrication
52
28
6
Assembly
44
32
16
Total workers
194
100
43
NOTE: At the time of this study, no U.S. machine tool producer had a flexible manufacturing system on line.
SOURCE: R. Jaikumar. Post-industrial manufacturing. 1986. HarvardBusiness Review, Vol. 64.
modes of production obsolete. Firms that hope to compete in the world market have no choice but to adopt it and learn to use it to their greatest advantage.
A 1988 Department of Defense report2 found serious, if irregular, indications of decline in sectors of the industrial base that are critical to continued U.S. leadership in advanced technologies and, by extension, to national security. The report finds particularly devastating the erosion of production technologies and equipment in vitally important sectors such as machine tools and electronics manufacturing equipment (see Table 1-3 and Table 1-4). Noting
TABLE 1-3 Top 10 Merchant Integrated Circuit Makers
Rank
1976
1986
1996
1.
Texas Instruments
NEC
IBM
2.
Fairchild
Texas Instruments
NEC
3.
Signetics
Fujitsu
Fujitsu
4.
National
Hitachi
Hitachi
5.
Intel
Motorola
Toshiba
6.
Motorola
Toshiba
Texas Instruments
7.
NEC
Philips
Matsushita
8.
GI
National
Mitsubishi
9.
RCA
Intel
Samsung
10.
Rockwell
Matsushita
Seimens
SOURCE: Microelectronic Engineering at RIT: Manpower for Tomorrow's Technology.
