Building America’s Future: Smart Investments in Advanced Manufacturing

Guest blog post by Commerce Secretary John Bryson
I had the opportunity today to join President Obama on a visit to the Rolls-Royce Crosspointe facility in Prince George’s County, Virginia. This facility manufactures components of some of the company’s most advanced airplane engines. The company announced that it is planning to add 140 new jobs at Crosspointe and more than 100 additional jobs in Indiana manufacturing components for aircraft wings.
As I have said and as the President said today, we are fully committed to helping U.S. businesses build things here and sell them everywhere. The Crosspointe facility is an important example of how we are doing just that, and it was remarkable to have the opportunity to see these efforts in action.
Crosspointe received a $4 million investment from the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) to help establish the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM). Later this summer, the CCAM, an applied research center developed by eight companies, the state of Virginia, and three leading state universities, will open its doors. This will help bridge the gap from research to product development while supporting the skills that workers need to get good jobs in advanced manufacturing. In addition, CCAM will form linkages to local community colleges to promote workforce training and high-skilled employment. The project is expected to create 128 jobs, while at the same time strengthening advanced manufacturing in the immediate area, and generating $22 million in private investment.
Over the past two years, the U.S. manufacturing sector has added 429,000 manufacturing jobs, the biggest jump since the 1990s. In that last two months alone, over 80,000 jobs have been added.
To build on this momentum, the President today announced a $1-billion proposal for a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI), to create a network of up to 15 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation around the country – building on the successful development of places like CCAM. These Institutes will serve as regional hubs of manufacturing excellence that will help to make our manufacturers more innovative at home and competitive abroad, while also encouraging more overall investment in the United States from both domestic and foreign firms. The EDA grant that made CCAM possible is one step toward the creating this engine of innovative advanced manufacturing facilities all over the country.
More immediately, as part of the Administration’s We Can’t Wait efforts, the Commerce Department will have a lead role in launching a pilot institute for the NNMI. This will be a competitive award funded by $45 million from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy and the National Science Foundation.
At the Commerce Department, we are also hard at work on several other initiatives to support American manufacturers and help increase their global competitiveness. For example, through our National Institute of Standards & Technology, we are investing more than $135 million in advanced manufacturing research and development. We also recently created the Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office to bring together stakeholders and drive investments and initiatives in advanced manufacturing. I also encourage everyone to check out Manufacturing.govto find out more about how we support manufacturers.
We are also leading the President’s SelectUSA initiative, which is encouraging even more companies like Rolls Royce to increase their direct investment in the United States – by building new facilities here and hiring talented Americans to work at them.
It’s clear that we need we need a robust, innovative manufacturing sector making products here and selling them around the globe. This will ensure that manufacturers create keep creating good, 21^st century American jobs.
Learn more about the Administration’s manufacturing initiatives

How To Create a Sea of Manufacturing Jobs

by Mike Shipulski

December 21st, 2011

It’s been a long slide from greatness for US manufacturing. It’s been downhill since the 70s – a multi-decade slide. Lately there’s a lot of hype about a manufacturing renaissance in the US – re-shoring, on-shoring, right-shoring. But the celebration is misguided. A real, sustainable return to greatness will take decades, decades of single-minded focus, coordination, alignment and hard work – industry, government, and academia in it together for the long haul.
To return to greatness, the number of new manufacturing jobs to be created is distressing. 100,000 new manufacturing jobs is paltry. And today there is a severe skills gap. Today there are unfilled manufacturing jobs because there’s no one to do the work. No one has the skills. With so many without jobs it sad. No, it’s a shame. And the manufacturing talent pipeline is dry – priming before filling. Creating a sea of new manufacturing jobs will be hard, but filling them will be harder. What can we do?
The first thing to do is make list of all the open manufacturing jobs and categorize them. Sort them by themes: by discipline, skills, experience, tools. Use the themes to create training programs, train people, and fill the open jobs. (Demonstrate coordinated work of government, industry, and academia.) Then, using the learning, repeat. Define themes of open manufacturing jobs, create training programs, train, and fill the jobs. After doing this several times there will be sufficient knowledge to predict needed skills and proactive training can begin. This cycle should continue for decades.
Now the tough parts – transcending our short time horizon and finding the money. Our time horizon is limited to the presidential election cycle – four years, but the manufacturing rebirth will take decades. Our four year time horizon prevents success. There needs to be a guiding force that maintains consistency of purpose – manufacturing resurgence – a consistency of purpose for decades. And the resurgence cannot require additional money. (There isn’t any.) So who has a long time horizon and money?
The DoD has both – the long term view (the military is not elected or appointed) and the money. (They buy a lot of stuff.) Before you call me a war hawk, this is simply a marriage of convenience. I wish there was, but there is no better option.
The DoD should pull together their biggest contractors (industry) and decree that the stuff they buy will have radically reduced cost signatures and teach them and their sub-tier folks how to get it done. No cost reduction, no contract. (There’s no reason military stuff should cost what it does, other than the DoD contractors don’t know how design things cost effectively.) The DoD should educate their contractors how to design products to reduce material cost, assembly time, supply chain complexity, and time to market and demand the suppliers. Then, demand they demonstrate the learning by designing the next generation stuff. (We mistakenly limit manufacturing to making, when, in fact, radical improvement is realized when we see manufacturing as designing and making.)
The DoD should increase its applied research at the expense of its basic research. They should fund applied research that solves real problems that result in reduced cost signatures, reduce total cost of ownership, and improved performance. Likely, they should fund technologies to improve engineering tools, technologies that make themselves energy independent and new materials. Once used in production-grade systems, the new technologies will spill into non-DoD world (broad industry application) and create new generation products and a sea of manufacturing jobs.
I think this is approach has a balanced time horizon – fill manufacturing jobs now and do the long term work to create millions of manufacturing jobs in the future.
Yes, the DoD is at the center of the approach. Yes, some have a problem with that. Yes, it’s a marriage of convenience. Yes, it requires coordination among DoD, industry, and academia. Yes, that’s almost impossible to imagine. Yes, it requires consistency of purpose over decades. And, yes, it’s the best way I know.