Manufacturing Challenges the New Breed

Abstract

HE GENUS NOVUS or “new breed” of manufacturing professional has come of age. This “new breed” has achieved that delicate position of balance within the total business team from which the most significant contributions of alternative analysis and business decisionmaking emanate. Traditionally, manufacturing management was left to its own imagination to determine the producibility, reliability, and maintainability of the engineer-designed product. Today that view of the role of manufacturing has become obsolete. “Production issues” like quality assurance, design producibility, cost achievement, product performance, and sparing have given way to critical path charting of the key milestones leading to product acceptability. With its understanding of technical design and the total business picture, the “new breed” of manufacturing personnel is neither engineering’s cast-off nor the outgrowth of the top of the rank and file. The subtleties of this transformation are best exemplified in retrospect by personal manufacturing experiences over the last quarter century. In the period from 1950 through the late 1960’s, a number of major corporations, such as the General Electric Company, committed large resources to the concept of Management Training Programs. The objective was to accelerate the development of the academically trained engineer into potential middle management positions. Individualists by nature, many of these thoroughly trained businessmen were motivated by the challenges of professional mobility and personal growth. Consequently, during the 1960’s and into the 1970’s, they migrated from these companies into the middle management of other larger firms. Thus the seeds of this “new breed” were planted. During the 1970’s we saw an experienced professional emerge from the natural extension of this maturation process. At the same time, the extraordinary growth of new venture businesses like Inforex created a new demand in management for this type of professional. And the “new breed” manufacturing professional was ready to meet that challenge. Today’s manufacturing team has as one of its fundamental business premises total product involvement in the planning, development, and production phases. Manufacturing management has come of age and is an integral variable in the total business equation. From product inception and planning to the development of the business plan, personal interaction in the design phase, and cooperation with engineering over producibility, manufacturing’s “new breed” provides an awareness of the latest process technology, participates in trade-off analysis, and in