I have spent my entire professional career, up to March 2009, working for machine tool builders. I worked on Computer Numerical Controlled machine tools - lathes and mills in all sorts of modern variants - multi-axis, multi-spindles, 25,000 RPM, ludicrous speed processing and high speed cutting with hi tech pvd coated carbide cutting tools.
My former company had a cnc turning machine with multi axis capability and an opposed pick off spindle where you could put raw bar in one side, and yield completed parts coming out the parts catcher on the other side. This machine could conceivable put out of work 20 or 50 workers of traditional factory machines, where each feature of the part is one work station, with human operator, and the part slowly migrates through the factory, risking scrappage at each work station.
In short, this equipment is justified by putting labor intensive jobs and people out of work. To stay traditional in manufacturing is simply to die. You have to keep up with technology to survive. The quality of the part, contained in one machine for it's entire manufacture, is as good as it could possibly be with the cnc chip removal process!
But, this shifted the work to other arenas - sales, inventory, cnc programming, and other indirect jobs grow to support the output of the cnc machine tool. So it's a displacement of workers from a job of drudgery to jobs where thinking and education are required.
The goal in manufacturing is to take the operator out of it and shrink the direct labor work force. Operations that didn't do that are long gone or a quaint anachronism.
I was at a Solidworks User Group meeting last night. There was a presentation by the Connecticut Corsair Project.
http://www.connecticutcorsair.com/index.php They are doing what amounts to archeology about how these planes were originally made. A remarkable project of reverse engineering (copying) parts built from 40's methodology using modern state of the art technology like laser scanners and photo-telemetry and modern computer coordinate measuring machines to duplicate old labor intensive manufacturing processes. In very many cases, because they didn't find any Assembly instructions or fixtures, the methods for how these planes were first built has been lost to history. plate that may have been cut out by hand with many people following a scribed line in a aluminum plate with a bandsaw are now sliced out of sheet on a cnc laser cutter!
I love manufacturing and I've been fascinated all my life with how things are made. I've been offended since I got in to the business thirty years ago at how casually American Executives would shut down American manufacturing capability and whore it out to overseas companies that thrive on doing what we used to do. There are entire technologies in manufacturing, like dvd players, vcr,s tv's, shoes, clothes, washing machines, and other stuff, that are no longer manufactured in any form in the USA.
There's plenty of manufacturing going on in the USA to this day, but it's pretty invisible to all of us because very few in America are involved with manufacturing anymore. Any economist will tell you that the only way to maintain prosperity is to have a strong manufacturing base. Cutting each other's hair don't do it. And, money handling (banking and Wall Street) unto itself won't create any wealth either. Especially because the big money is in extraction, not producing, as Dylan Ratigan says when ever he talks about the bailouts.
Manufacturing is the red haired stepchild of business and less people in America have any appreciation or understanding of it these days. I myself love it, but, admittedly, there's more to manufacturing that I don't know than what I know! I know precision material removal by the chip making cutting tool process, and there's a lot more out there than that slice!
-90% Jimmy