On keeping manufacturing local

As Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, was autographing my copy of his book Sketching User Experiences, we had the opportunity to discuss how to keep manufacturing thriving locally. According to Bill, the key is to remember that process design will always trump product design.

At first this concept seems too simple to be important. That's the beauty of it! But, we need to define design. As engineers, we often consider design to be the adding of detail to the engineering. But here we mean design as the process of specifying what it is that we are to engineer. It is the role that the packaging graphic artists have in the marketing department, not the role of the detailers in engineering.

Process design is about the business developing a plan to most successfully fulfill its mission. It is a creative process of getting all of the right steps in the right sequence.

Combine this idea with the comments of Glen Murray, Ontario's Minister of Research and Innovation, and you come up with a really winning formula. Whereas production used to be the major creator of wealth for our economies, today it is innovation. Every time we turned out a new widget, we made money, even though each one was just like the last one. Today, that formula for success has limited application. We must be constantly changing and improving. We must adapt innovation to every production and service function to create productivity.

So, the key to keeping manufacturing local is to develop innovative processes by design. Next time you are given a problem to solve for your company, stop and think about if this is what you are doing.

By the way, I'll be reading Bill's book and commenting on it here.

TrackBack

Comments Hi Keith, I've enjoyed reading your blog for some time now, but I wanted to especially thank you for your post about "Keeping Manufacturing Local." I work at a commercial printing company in Long Island City, NY. As a family-owned and locally-operated facility, we've certainly experienced some rough weather during the past several years. However, you are absolutely correct that focusing on innovation and developing creative processes is the key to maintaining our business. When most small printing companies were closing left and right during the recession, we buckled down and refined our processes while finding new ways to meet client demands. We made the leap to undertake a rebranding as well as a website redesign and began taking on larger clients who appreciated our manufacturing efficiency. Thanks again for the great post, and I hope to see more like it! Posted by: Ashley Piper on June 1, 2011 Post a comment (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) Name: Email Address: URL: Remember personal info? Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style) Type the word 'packaging' (required):