Manufacturing Control via the Internet

Manufacturing control via the Internet (e-manufacturing) refers to the process of integrating information and communication networks as well as Internet-supported robotics into the production systems, processes, and structures of the firm. As such, the firm uses the Internet to link production equipments and control functions of its manufacturing systems through series of real-time monitoring gadgets such as computers and mobile communication devices. E-manufacturing comes with many advantages that include: ubiquitous accessibility, remote-controlled monitoring possibilities, real-time communications capabilities, and increased production efficiency as a result of information-integrated production systems.

The unlimited linkage of manufacturing operations to the global communication infrastructure is a phenomenon that relies heavily on the Internet's networking technology. The Internet consists of physically-networked servers and advanced communication linkages that relay information across Web-based servers and client computers. The advent of the Internet and the subsequent advancement of digital technologies have introduced new economic frontiers characterized by the emergence of revolutionary and information-driven economic institutions. The increased access to the global information and communication infrastructures has closed the gaps among consumers, manufacturers, and suppliers by eliminating the political, economic, and geographic barriers.

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

The origins of the Internet can be traced to the 1960s military research activities of the United States Army. In the book titled Internet Literacy, Fred Hofstetter credits the United States Department of Defense for developing the first ever viable Internet called ARPANET through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1969. The main objective of ARPANET was to provide the U.S. military with a communication network capacity that could withstand turbulence and obstructions that rose from enemy attacks. It would accomplish this by relying on sets of networked computers to transmit labeled and addressed packets of information to designated destinations, even if one or more of the computers along the way stopped functioning. Thus, in the event of enemy attacks (such as a massive bombing campaign), the packets of information would automatically be routed through alternative paths to their intended destinations.

Commercial use of the Internet has been evident ever since the early 1990s following the liberalization of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) in the United States. The move opened up the routing of high-speed Internet traffic to different interconnected Internet service providers (ISPs), thereby providing easy access to pioneer online auction and commercial entities such as Amazon, eBay, and PayPal. The Internet has since become a powerful tool for trade, commerce, and manufacturing because of its formidable infrastructure that runs across the globe.

THE INTERNET AND MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

The use of computer-based networking in production activities is based on the materials and requirement planning (MRP) framework that is demand dependent and specifically geared to assembly operations in firms. MRP was developed in the 1960s and still remains an important component of industrial manufacturing processes. Computerized MRP has evolved into MRP II, which involves linking and streamlining operations in different departments such as marketing, purchasing, production planning and control, human-resource management, and financial accounting.

MRP II integrates different functions in the firm into a central monitoring and decision system by collecting and relaying data and additional production inputs. The advancements in MRP II have given rise to enterprise resource planning (ERP), which integrates different types of industrial data, processes, and functions into a unified database through comprehensive linkages of software and hardware systems. Unlike MRP and MRP II, ERP has the capacity to link organizational functionalities through multiple systems. Instead of functions such as human resource management, production control, customer relations, financial accounting, and supply chain management existing in independent software applications and individual databases, ERP brings all these functions under one roof to share a single database and software applications.

The ability for ERP to streamline workflows, track processes, and improve productivity makes it easy for manufacturing companies to integrate e-manufacturing in controlling and managing industrial production processes. The implementation of e-manufacturing strategies through the existing ERP systems definitely revolutionizes the monitoring and functioning of the engineering capacity of machines, quality control, material control, and workflow processes.

Firms can use either in-house teams and software applications or software vendors and consultants to implement customized e-manufacturing systems. For example, Jain has contracted Rockwell Automation, a leading industrial automation software and service provider in the United States, to manage its entire processes of real-time automation and track the company's manufacturing data.

Companies can also outsource the management of e-manufacturing to industrial automation and software companies that have global presence such as Oracle and IBM.

The twenty-first century has experienced unprecedented increase in the use of telephone modems, Ethernet wireless connections, cable modems, digital subscriber lines (DSL), and satellite communications to access Web-based services such as e-mails, newsgroups, chat rooms, real-time messaging, and list servers through either computers or mobile devices. Manufacturing companies are embedding digital devices and sensors that range from micro-scale to macro-scale sizes in all aspects of production. For example, as Kwon Yongjin and Rauniar Shreepud point out in their 2007 journal article titled “E-Quality Manufacturing (EQM) Within the Framework of Internet-Based System” and contained in the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C: Application and Reviews, manufacturers use advanced tools such as the Ethernet SmartImage sensor and the Internet Controllable Yamaha Scara robot to initiate continuous correspondence in production processes with the objective of monitoring and achieving sustained quality control.

Manufacturing companies are continuously taking advantage of the advancements in Internet tracking and communications technologies to entrench quality control and monitor daily production activities in firms. In addition to using the Internet to remotely monitor and track production processes, companies also use the Internet to diagnose faulty functionalities of equipment and processes in the entire production system. Remote and automated access to manufacturing systems enables operations managers and production line experts to sustain quality control and initiate instant responses to sudden changes in a firm's manufacturing environment.

The most common real-time solutions that companies employ in production control include chat rooms and instant messaging (IM), which allows the use of voice calls, file sharing, webcams, information-on-demand (such as news, weather, auctions, and stock trading), and online status reporting. Leading IM providers include AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), Microsoft's MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Skype.

The twenty-first century has also experienced the increased use of Ethernet video on the floor of the manufacturing plants to monitor operations, streamline coordination, train workers, and control repairs and maintenance. In an Internet article titled Video via Ethernet Now, Martin T. Hoske acknowledges that in addition to enhancing security applications during production processes, Ethernet video applications have also proved to be effective time-saving tools.

SECURITY AND THREATS TO E-MANUFACTURING

Real-time manufacturing control via the Internet is prone to enforceable inconveniences that are beyond the control of the organizations. Such inconveniences include network failure of ISPs or time lag as a result of network congestions. Moreover, the unauthorized access to network systems by hackers, crackers, state intelligence agencies, and other types of intruders remains the biggest threat to Internet security. Internet security threats come in the form of Internet break-ins, Internet fraud, and message sniffing.

Internet break-ins . Internet break-ins are particularly committed by crackers who gain unauthorized access into Web sites to collect private information about individuals, companies, and organizations. Crackers can disastrously land on a firm's private information such as credit card numbers, bank account details of individuals, or classified company information such as production formulas, secret codes, and classified data. In the United States, Internet break-in is treated both as theft and trespassing by the federal laws; offenders can be handed up to a five-year prison sentence for stealing money and ten years for fraudulent acquisition of a company's classified information.

Internet fraud. Internet fraud involves the use of Web site tools such as chat rooms, e-mails, or newsgroups by fraudsters to offer services and products that do not exist with the aim of convincing unsuspecting Internet users to transfer money or goods to the fraudsters. The increased prevalence of Internet fraud, particularly in online auctions, has prompted regulatory authorities in the United States to respond by setting up the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC). Consisting of a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center, the IFCC controls and coordinates campaigns against Internet fraud by providing Internet fraud reporting structures and mechanisms for forwarding fraud cases to law enforcement agencies.

Message sniffing. Message sniffing involves intercepting e-mail communication messages on the Internet with the aim of gaining access to the content of the e-mail messages. Sniffing targets the routes and gateways that link the networks to the Information Superhighway. Incidentally, each computer on the network is a gateway prone to hacking by crackers. For example, the FBI scans both local and international Internet communications in the United States using a customizable electronic sniffing gadget called Carnivore.

Carnivore can be installed in one or more ISPs to monitor the Internet traffic in regard to transmissions of e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, and newsgroups, and it automatically forwards any suspect communications

to the FBI data repositories. Although the use of Carnivore by the FBI to spy on private and public communications in the United States raises major privacy concerns, the action is fully backed by the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005, which have broadened the authority of U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence agencies to apply Internet-based surveillance systems in investigations.

DATA PROTECTION MEASURES FOR E-MANUFACTURING

So many security threats lurk in the communication network systems that no company can afford to run an unprotected Internet network. There are several measures that a company can employ to protect its Internet network from unauthorized access by intruders. Use of password protection, data encryption, firewall, data filters, and employee training are some of the probable measures that companies can adopt as protection against Internet security risks.

Use of passwords . Use of passwords enables companies to limit Web site access to users with authorized passwords. However, password codes should never be fully trusted because crackers can use sophisticated software to break the codes and access the private content in the Web site and e-mail messages.

Data encryption. Data encryption protects data from crackers and sniffing gadgets during the process of transmitting information between computers and network servers. Encrypted messages do not allow access to people who do not have the keys to the encryption codes. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is one good example of encryption programs. Fred Hofstetter contends that PGP provides a reliable mode for encrypting messages because it can run on any brand of computer. Companies can acquire messaging software such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook which are equipped with built-in encryption abilities.

Firewalls . Firewalls stand out as reliable Internet-security-enhancing tools because they prevent a company's data from flowing beyond the domain restrictions, in addition to preventing users of other domains from accessing the company's domain. Companies implement firewall restrictions by combining software tools, hardware equipment, and relevant IT security policies that block the movement of restricted data across the company's network and computers.

Firewalls are particularly used to protect the company's intranet from unlimited public access through programming of the firewall software to regulate minimum and maximum access levels between the company's intranet and the public Internet.

Data filters. Companies can use data filters to scan and sift the outgoing and incoming data for certain types of Internet content. Data filters can be applied in situations where the company is seeking to block employees from accessing certain Web sites such as adult content and Internet gambling sites. Data filters can be set either on the user or client servers.

Employee training. Employee training through Internet education programs can tremendously improve safety of Internet use in the company apart from improving the capacities of employees to detect and handle fraud. Employees should always be discouraged from responding to everything that they read on the Internet. Employees should be made aware of the dangers of revealing their personal bank account and credit card information and the company's classified data to information seekers with concealed identities.

SEE ALSO Enterprise Resource Planning

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hofstetter, Fred, T. Internet Literacy, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., 2006.

Hoske, Mark, T. “Video via Ethernet Now.” Control Engineering, January 12, 2007. Available from: http://www.controleng.com/article/CA6510487.html/.

National Institute of Standards and Technology. “Software Tackles Production Line Machine ‘Cyclic Jitters’.” Science Daily, 5 April 2008. Available from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080402101656.htm/.

Smith-Atakan, Serengul. Human-Computer Interaction. Middlesex University Press: Thomson Learning, 2006.

“Three Tiered Web-Based Manufacturing System—Part 1: System Development.” Robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing. 23, no. 1, (2007): 138–151. Available from: http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=J1050&type=periodical&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=183639&CFTOKEN=75352989.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Merging Control Software with Smart Devices Could Optimize Manufacturing.” Science Daily, 22 May 2008. Available from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080521105255.htm/.

Winschhsen, Molly, Janet Snell, and Jenny Johnson. Diploma in Digital Applications, Book 4. Heinemann, 2006.

Wolf-Ruediger, Hansen, and Frank Gillert. RFID for the Optimization of Business Processes. Wiley, 2008.

Yongjin, Kwon, and Rauniar Shreepud. “E-Quality Manufacturing (EQM) Within the Framework of Internet-Based Systems.” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C: Application and Reviews, 2007. Available from: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=19180416.

MANUFACTURING

MANUFACTURING. Rather than undergoing a single, rapid "industrial revolution," manufacturing in America has evolved over four centuries of European settlement. While the first colonists introduced some manufacturing processes to their "new world," manufacturing did not become a vital part of the economy until the achievement of national independence. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, all forms of manufacturing—household, artisanal, and factory based—grew and expanded, and textile manufacturing in particular spawned important new technologies. From the Civil War through the early twentieth century heavy industry grew rapidly, transforming the national economy and the very nature of society. After a period of manufacturing prosperity due, in part, to World War II, heavy industry began to decline and Americans suffered from deindustrialization and recession. The growth of high technology and the service sector in the final decades of the century offered both challenges and opportunities for American manufacturing.

The Colonial Era to 1808

Both of the major early English settlements hoped to establish manufacturing in America. The Virginia Company attempted to set up iron foundries and glass manufactories on the James River while the Puritans built several iron foundries in Massachusetts. As colonization proceeded, however, manufacturing became increasingly peripheral to the economy. With quicker and easier profits to be made from cash crops and trans-Atlantic trade, colonists exerted little effort toward manufacturing. Beginning in the late-seventeenth century, colonial manufacturing was further hindered by mercantilistic restrictions imposed by the English, most notably the Woolen Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), and Iron Act (1750). All three of these acts were designed to limit nascent colonial competition with English manufacturers in keeping with the developing mercantilistic perception that colonies should serve the empire as producers of raw materials and consumers of finished products from the mother country. While large-scale iron and steel manufacturing continued to have a presence in the colonies, most colonial manufacturing would still be performed in the farm household and, to a lesser extent, within craft shops.

It was only after the French and Indian War (1689– 1763) that Americans, propelled by their new quest for independence from England, began to turn toward manufacturing in a systematic way. Colonial resistance to the Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), Townshend Duties (1767), and Coercive Acts (1774/1775) all involved economic boycotts of British goods, creating a patriotic imperative to produce clothing, glass, paint, paper, and other substitutes for British imports. Empowered by this movement and increasingly politicized by the resistance, urban artisans began to push for a permanently enlarged domestic manufacturing sector as a sign of economic independence from Britain.

The Revolution itself offered some encouragement to domestic manufacturing, particularly war materiel such as salt petre, armaments, ships, and iron and steel. But it also inhibited manufacturing for a number of reasons. Skilled laborers, already scarce before the war, were now extremely difficult to find. Wartime disruptions, including the British blockade and evacuation of manufacturing centers such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia further hindered manufacturing.

In the years immediately following the war, manufacturing began to expand on a wider scale. Lobbying efforts by urban mechanics as well as some merchants swayed state governments and later the new federal government to establish mildly protective tariffs and to encourage factory projects, the most famous of which was Alexander Hamilton's Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures in Patterson, New Jersey. New immigrants brought European industrial technologies. The best known case was that of Samuel Slater, who established some of the new nation's first mechanized textile mills in Rhode Island in the 1790s. But the great majority of manufacturing establishments still relied on traditional technologies to perform tasks such as brewing beer, refining sugar, building ships, and making rope. Moreover, craft production and farm-based domestic manufacturing, both of which grew rapidly during this period, continued to be the most characteristic forms of American manufacturing.

From 1808 to the Civil War

Factory production, particularly in the textile industries, became an important part of the American economy during the Embargo of 1808 and the War of 1812. During these years imports were in short supply due to the United States' efforts to boycott European trade and disruptions caused by the British navy during the war. Economic opportunity and patriotic rhetoric pushed Americans to build their largest textile factories to date, from Baltimore's Union Manufactory to the famous establishments financed by the Boston Associates in 1814 in Waltham and in 1826 in Lowell, Massachusetts. America's first million-dollar factories, they used the latest technologies and employed thousands of workers, many of them women and children. After the war promanufacturing protectionists pushed for high tariffs to ensure that manufacturing would continue to flourish. These efforts culminated with the so-called Tariff of Abominations of 1828, which included rates of 25 percent and more on some imported textiles. Protectionism was a vital part of the Whig Party's American System, consisting of tariffs, improved transportation, and better banking. But after 1832, as Southerners successfully fought to lower tariffs, government protection of manufacturing waned.

During these years the proportion of the workforce involved in manufacturing grew more rapidly than in any other period in America's history, rising from only 3.2 percent in 1810 to 18.3 percent by 1860. Growth in textile manufacturing led the way. Cotton production capacity alone increased from 8,000 spindles in 1808 to 80,000 by 1811 and up to 5.2 million by the dawn of the Civil War. By 1860 the United States was, according to some calculations, the world's second greatest manufacturing economy, behind only England. Spectacular as this growth was, it did not come only from the revolution in textile manufacturing. In fact, American manufacturing was extremely varied. While even Europeans admired American inventors' clever use of interchangeable parts and mechanized production, traditional technologies also continued to flourish. Household production, although declining relative to newer forms, remained a significant element of American manufacturing. Many industries other than textiles, and even some branches of textiles, relied on more traditional processes. Established urban centers such as New York City experienced metropolitan industrialization that relied more on the expansion and modification of traditional craft processes than on construction of large vertically integrated factories on the Lowell model.

From the Civil War to World War II

During the latter part of the nineteenth century the United States became the world's leading industrial nation, exceeding the combined outputs of Great Britain, France, and Germany by 1900. Between 1860 and 1900 the share of manufacturing in the nation's total production rose from 32 percent to 53 percent and the number of workers employed in manufacturing tripled from 1.31 million to 4.83 million. Heavy industry, particularly steel, played the most dramatic role in this story. Between 1873 and 1892 the national output of bessemer steel rose from 157,000 to 4.66 million tons. Geographically, the trans-Appalachian midwest was responsible for a disproportionate amount of this growth. Major steel-making centers such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago led the way. The combined population of these industrial metropolises grew by more than 2,500 percent between 1850 and 1900. Yet, even smaller midwestern towns rapidly industrialized; by 1880 60 percent of Ohio's population was employed in manufacturing, and ten years later Peoria County, Illinois, was the most heavily industrialized in the United States. To a far lesser extent manufacturing also extended into the New South after the Civil War. Here industries based on longtime southern agricultural staples such as cotton manufacturing and cigarette making led the way, following some mining and heavy industry.

Besides the growth of heavy industry and large cities, this era marked the onset of big business. The railroad industry, which benefited from the ease of coordination offered by large units, set the pace, but it was in the steel industry that bigness really triumphed, culminating in the creation of United States Steel, America's first billion-dollar firm (it was capitalized at $1.4 billion in 1901). By 1904, 318 large firms controlled 40 percent of all American manufacturing assets. Firms grew due to vertical integration (incorporating units performing all related manufacturing functions from extraction to marketing) as well as horizontal integration (incorporating new units providing similar functions throughout the country). Such growth was hardly limited to heavy industry; among the most famous examples of vertical integration was the Swift Meat Packing Corporation, which, during the 1870s and 1880s, acquired warehouses, retail outlets, distributorships, fertilizer plants, and other units that built on its core businesses.

While consumers welcomed the increasing availability of mass-produced goods ranging from dressed meat to pianos, the growth of big industry also worried many Americans. Concerns that the new colossuses would serve as monopolies spurred government concern, beginning with state actions in the 1880s and the federal Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and followed by a number of largely ineffectual efforts by federal courts to bust trusts such as those alleged in the whiskey and lumber industries to keep the market competitive for smaller players. Perhaps more importantly, workers were also frightened by the increasing amount of economic power in the hands of a few industrial giants who were able to slash wages at will. Major labor actions against railroad and steel corporations helped to build new unions such as the Knights of Labor (established 1869), the United Mine Workers (1890), and the American Federation of Labor (1886). In the 1890s there were an average of 1,300 work stoppages involving 250,000 workers per year. Such actions sometimes ended in near-warfare, as in the famous case of the 1892 strike at Carnegie Steel's Homestead, Pennsylvania, plant.

The most important new manufacture of the twentieth century was the automobile. In 1900 the United States produced fewer than $5 million worth of automobiles. Only sixteen years later American factories turned out more than 1.6 million cars valued at over half a billion dollars. Henry Ford's assembly line production techniques showcased in his enormous River Rouge factory transformed industry worldwide. Automobile production also stimulated and transformed many ancillary industries such as petroleum, rubber, steel, and, with the development of the enclosed automobile, glass. Automobiles also contributed significantly to the growth of a consumer culture in the era before World War II, leading to new forms of commuting, shopping, traveling, and even new adolescent dating rituals. While the development of new forms of consumption kept the economy afloat during good times, reluctance to purchase goods such as automobiles and radios during the Great Depression would intensify the economic stagnation of the 1930s.

World War II to 2000

After the fallow years of the depression, heavy industry again thrived during and after World War II, buoyed by defense spending as well as consumer purchases. Due partly to the politics of federal defense contracts and partly to lower labor costs, the South and West experienced more rapid industrial growth than the established manufacturing centers in the Northeast and Midwest. While workers in the Pacific coast states accounted for only 5.5 percent of the nation's manufacturing workforce in 1939, by 1969 they accounted for 10.5 percent of the total. Manufacturing employment in San Jose, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas all grew by more than 50 percent between 1960 and 1970.

Industrial employment reached its peak in 1970, when 26 percent of Americans worked in the manufacturing sector. By 1998 the percentage had plunged to 16 percent, the lowest since the Civil War. Deindustrialization struck particularly hard during the 1970s when, according to one estimate, more than 32 million jobs may have been destroyed or adversely affected, as manufacturing firms shut down, cut back, and moved their plants. Due to increasing globalization, manufacturing jobs, which previously moved from the northern rust belt to the southern and western sun belt, could now be performed for even lower wages in Asia and Latin America. These developments led some observers to label the late twentieth century a post-industrial era and suggest that service industry jobs would replace manufacturing as the backbone of the economy, just as manufacturing had superseded agriculture in the nineteenth century. They may have spoken too soon. In the boom years of the 1990s the number of manufacturing jobs continued to drop, but increased productivity led to gains in output for many industries, most notably in the high technology sector. Additionally, other economic observers have argued that manufacturing will continue to matter because the linkages that it provides are vital to the service sector. Without manufacturing, they suggest, the service sector would quickly follow our factories to foreign countries. Thus, at the dawn of the twenty-first century the future of manufacturing and the economy as a whole remained murky.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bluestone, Barry, and Bennett Harrison. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Clark, Victor. History of Manufactures in the United States, 1893–1928. 3 vols. New York: McGraw Hill, 1929.

Cochran, Thomas. American Business in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Cochran, Thomas, and William Miller. The Age of Enterprise: ASocial History of Industrial America. New York: Macmillan, 1942.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Porter, Glenn. The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910. New York: Caswell, 1973; Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1973.

Tryon, Rolla M. Household Manufactures in the United States,1640–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1966.

Lawrence A.Peskin

See alsoAutomobile ; Automobile Industry ; Cotton ; Demography and Demographic Trends ; Great Depression ; Iron and Steel Industry ; Labor ; Textiles .

MANUFACTURING

One can trace the origins of modern manufacturing management to the advent of agricultural production, which meant that humans did not constantly have to wander to find new sources of food. Since that time, people have been developing better techniques for producing goods to meet human needs and wants. Since they had additional time available because of more efficient food sources, people began to develop techniques to produce items for use and trade. They also began to specialize based on their skills and resources. With the first era of water-based exploration, trade, and conflict, new ideas regarding product development eventually emerged, over the course of the centuries, leading to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century. The early twentieth century, however, is generally considered to mark the true beginning of a disciplined effort to study

and improve manufacturing and operations management practices. Thus, what we know as modern manufacturing began in the final decades of the twentieth century.

The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the development of the manufacturing strategy paradigm by researchers at the Harvard Business School. This work focused on how manufacturing executives could use their factories' capabilities as strategic competitive weapons, specifically identifying how what we call the five P's of manufacturing management (people, plants, parts, processes, and planning) can be analyzed as strategic and tactical decision variables. Central to this notion is the focus on factory and manufacturing trade-offs. Because a factory cannot excel on all performance measures, its management must devise a focused strategy, creating a focused factory that does a limited set of tasks extremely well. Thus the need arose for making trade-offs among such performance measures as low cost, high quality, and high flexibility in designing and managing factories.

The 1980s saw a revolution in management philosophy and the technologies used in manufacturing. Just-in-time (JIT) production was the primary breakthrough in manufacturing philosophy. Pioneered by the Japanese, JIT is an integrated set of activities designed to achieve high-volume production using minimal inventories of parts that arrive at the workstation "just in time." This philosophy—coupled with total quality control (TQC), which aggressively seeks to eliminate causes of production defects—is now a cornerstone in many manufacturers' practices.

As profound as JIT's impact has been, factory automation in its various forms promises to have an even greater impact on operations management in coming decades. Such terms as computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), and factory of the future (FOF) are part of the vocabulary of manufacturing leaders.

Another major development of the 1970s and 1980s was the broad application of computers to operations problems. For manufacturers, the big breakthrough was the application of materials requirements planning (MRP) to production control. This approach brings together, in a computer program, all the parts that go into complicated products. This computer program then enables production planners to quickly adjust production schedules and inventory purchases to meet changing demands during the manufacturing process. Clearly, the massive data manipulation required for changing the schedules of products with thousands of parts would be impossible without such programs and the computer capacity to run them. The promotion of this approach by the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS) has been termed the MRP Crusade.

The hallmark development in the field of manufacturing management, as well as in management practice in general, is total quality management (TQM). Although practiced by many companies in the 1980s, TQM became truly pervasive in the 1990s. All manufacturing executives are aware of the quality message put forth by the so-called quality gurus—W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, and Philip Crosby. Helping the quality movement along was the creation of the Baldrige National Quality Award in 1986 under the direction of the American Society of Quality Control and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Baldrige Award recognizes up to five companies a year for outstanding quality management systems.

The ISO 9000 certification standards, issued by the International Organization for Standardization, now play a major role in setting quality standards, particularly for global manufacturers. Many European companies require that their vendors meet these standards as a condition for obtaining contracts.

The need to become or remain competitive in the global economic recession of the early 1990s pushed companies to seek major innovations in the processes used to run their operations. One major type of business process reengineering (BPR) is conveyed in the title of Michael Hammer's influential article "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate." The approach seeks to make revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, changes. It does this by taking a fresh look at what the organization is trying to do, and then eliminating non-value-added steps and computerizing the remaining ones to achieve the desired out-come.

The idea is to apply a total system approach to managing the flow of information, materials, and services from raw material suppliers through factories and warehouses to the end customer. Recent trends, such as outsourcing and mass customization, are forcing companies to find flexible ways to meet customer demand. The focus is on optimizing those core activities in order to maximize the speed of response to changes in customer expectations.

Based on the work of several researchers, a few basic operations priorities have been identified. These priorities include cost, product quality and reliability, delivery speed, delivery reliability, ability to cope with changes in demand, flexibility, and speed of new product introduction. In every industry, there is usually a segment of the market that buys products—typically products that are commodity-like in nature like sugar, iron ore, or coal—strictly on the basis of low cost. Because this segment of the market is frequently very large, many companies are lured by the potential for significant profits, which they associate with the large unit volumes of the product. As a

consequence, competition in this segment is fierce—and so is the failure rate.

Quality can be divided into two categories: product quality and process quality. The level of a product's quality will vary with the market segment to which it is aimed because the goal in establishing the proper level of product quality is to meet the requirements of the customer. Overdesigned products with too high a level of quality will be viewed as prohibitively expensive. Underdesigned products, on the other hand, will result in losing customers to products that cost a little more but are perceived as offering greater benefits.

Process quality is critical since it relates directly to the reliability of the product. Regardless of the product, customers want products without defects. Thus, the goal of process quality is to produce error-free products. Adherence to product specifications is essential to ensure the reliability of the product as defined by its intended use.

A company's ability to deliver more quickly than its competitors may be critical. Take, for example, a company that offers a repair service for computer-networking equipment. A company that can offer on-site repair within one or two hours has a significant advantage over a competing firm that only guarantees service only within twenty-four hours.

Delivery reliability relates to a firm's ability to supply the product or service on or before a promised delivery due date. The focus during the 1980s and 1990s on reducing inventory stocks in order to reduce cost has made delivery reliability an increasingly important criterion in evaluating alternative vendors.

A company's ability to respond to increases and decreases in demand is another important factor in its ability to compete. It is well known that a company with increasing demand can do little wrong. When demand is strong and increasing, costs are continuously reduced because of economies of scale, and investments in new technologies can be easily justified. Scaling back when demand decreases may require many difficult decisions regarding laying off employees and related reductions in assets. The ability to deal effectively with dynamic market demand over the long term is an essential element of manufacturing strategy.

Flexibility, from a strategic perspective, refers to a company's ability to offer a wide variety of products to its customers. In the 1990s companies began to adjust their processes and outputs to dynamic and sometimes volatile customer needs. An important component of flexibility is the ability to develop different products and deliver them to market. As new technologies and processes become widespread, a company must be able to respond to market demands more and more quickly if it is to continue to be successful.

Manufacturing strategy must be linked vertically to the customer and horizontally to other parts of the enterprise. Underlying this framework is senior management's strategic vision of the firm. This vision identifies, in general terms, the target market, the firm's product line, and its core enterprise and operations capabilities. The choice of a target market can be difficult, but it must be made. Indeed, it may lead to turning away business—ruling out a customer segment that would simply be unprofitable or too hard to serve given the firm's capabilities. Core capabilities are those skills that differentiate the manufacturing from its competitors.

In general, customers' new-product or current-product requirements set the performance priorities that then become the required priorities for operations. Manufacturing organizations have a linkage of priorities because they cannot satisfy customer needs without the involvement of R&D and distribution and without the direct or indirect support of financial management, human resource management, and information management. Given its performance requirements, a manufacturing division uses its capabilities to achieve these priority goals in order to complete sales. These capabilities include technology, systems, and people. CIM, JIT, and TQM represent fundamental concepts and tools used in each of the three areas.

Suppliers do not become suppliers unless their capabilities in the management of technology, systems, and people reach acceptable levels. In addition, most manufacturing capabilities are now subjected to the "make-or-buy" decision. It is current practice among world-class manufacturers to subject each part of a manufacturing operation to the question: If we are not among the best in the world at, say, metal forming, should we be doing this at all, or should we subcontract to someone who is the best?

The main objectives of manufacturing strategy development are (1) to translate required priorities into specific performance requirements for operations and (2) to make the necessary plans to assure that manufacturing capabilities are sufficient to accomplish them. Developing priorities involves the following steps:

1. Segment the market according to the product group.
2. Identify the product requirements, demand patterns, and profit margins of each group.
3. Determine the order winners and order qualifiers for each group.
4. Convert order winners into specific performance requirements.

It has been said that America's resurgence in manufacturing is not the result of U.S. firms being better innovators than most foreign competitors. This has been true for a long time. Rather, it is because U.S. firms are proving to be very effective copiers, having spent a decade examining the advantages of foreign rivals in product development, production operations, supply chain management, and corporate governance then putting in place functional equivalents that incrementally improve on their best techniques. Four main adaptations on the part of U.S. firms underscore this success:

1. New approaches to product-development team structure and management have resulted in getting products to market faster, with better designs and manufacturability.
2. Companies have improved their manufacturing facilities through dramatic reductions of work-in-process, space, tool costs, and human effort, while simultaneously improving quality and flexibility.
3. New methods of customer-supplier cooperation, which borrow from the Japanese keiretsu (large holding companies) practices of close linkages but maintain the independence of the organizations desired by U.S. companies, have been put in place.
4. Better leadership—through strong, independent boards of directors who will dismiss managers who are not doing their jobs effectively—now exists.

In sum, the last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed tremendous change and advancement in the means of producing goods and the manner of managing these operations that have led to higher levels of quality and quantity as well as greater efficiency in the use of resources. In the new millennium, because of global competition and the expansive use of new technologies, including the Internet, a successful firm will be one that is competitive with new products and services that are creatively marketed and effectively financed. Yet what is becoming increasingly critical is the ability to develop manufacturing practices that provide unique benefits to the products. The organization that can develop superior products, sell them at lower prices, and deliver them to their customers in a timely manner stands to become a formidable presence in the marketplace.

see also Factors of Production

Thomas Haynes

manufacturing industry. Given the lack of substantial mineral‐based natural resources, and a smaller and poorer domestic market, Ireland's industrial history was quite different from that of neighbouring Britain. Only in the north‐east, in Belfast and its hinterland, was Ireland to experience large‐scale factory‐based industrialization. Elsewhere the limited industrial development that took place depended mainly on organically based industries, predominantly those engaged in processing raw materials from the agricultural sector.

In the pre‐Anglo‐Norman period there is only limited archaeological evidence for industries such as high‐quality metalworking, jewellery, and souterrain‐ware pottery production in rural settlements such as ringforts. With the setting up of major Viking trading towns from the 10th century, mainly along the east coast, industrial production increased in size and intensity. In Hiberno‐Norse Dublin there is much evidence for industrial quarters: wood‐turners and coopers in Winetavern Street, leather working in High Street, and bone, antler, and metalworking in the adjoining area of High Street and Christchurch Place. Other Hiberno‐Norse towns such as Waterford have produced comparable material.

With the coming of the Anglo‐Normans the indigenous pottery industry expanded considerably, with kilns located at Downpatrick, Co. Down, and Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, as well as probable examples at Adare Castle, Co. Limerick, Trim Castle, Co. Meath, and near major urban centres such as Dublin. Ceramic floor tiles mainly produced for religious houses were also being produced in Ireland at places such as Drogheda and in the Kilkenny city area. Cloth production was also important, especially that based on the wool supplied from the great Cistercian houses of south‐east Ireland. Other industries important to the medieval economy included leather‐marking: excavations in Dublin and Cork have produced many items of worked leather such as footwear, scabbards, and other personal adornments, mainly of 13th‐ and 14th‐century date. Towns would also have been the centres of large iron and bronze metalworking industries, based largely on imported ores, but with centres such as Carrickfergus relying on local iron ore for their raw material. Coopering and woodworking were other industries which were located in both rural and urban settlements, testifying to the importance of wooden structures and artefacts in medieval Ireland.

Manufacturing industry in early modern Ireland remained limited in variety and scale. At the beginning of the 16th century commercial output included some manufactured items such as coarse linen cloth and iron goods for local consumption. Most exports were of unprocessed material such as linen yarn. The principal reason for this was a skill shortage combined with the lack of a marketing structure. During the 16th century central government encouraged Irish manufactures by limiting the export of linen yarn and introducing Flemish tanners to Ireland. These measures had limited success. The expansion of colonization in the early 17th century saw some growth in manufacturing with the expansion of ironworking, some glass production, and local promotion of cloth manufacture, but this was limited since land yielded a greater return than manufactures. Most economic activity consisted in exploiting unprocessed natural resources.

In the later 17th century there was a growth in manufacturing activity. The passage of the Cattle Acts encouraged the production of butter and processed beef and the woollen cloth trade expanded dramatically. Landlords, in order to ensure that a growing population would have enough cash to pay their rent, actively promoted manufacturing projects. This took the form of encouraging linen production through competitions and providing a guaranteed market for linen cloth, exports of which grew from 14,750 yards in 1665 to 131,568 yards in 1686. The Woollen Act of 1699 hit an expanding woollen cloth trade badly and the economic recession of the early 18th century affected other manufacturing activity. Brewing was disadvantaged by high local taxation. To combat this the Royal Dublin Society tried to promote local manufacturing activity by encouraging consumption of locally produced manufactured goods and promoting technical innovation.

During the second half of the 18th century a growing population and a steady rise in agricultural prosperity based on the demands of the expanding Atlantic trade provided the basis for a healthier and more broadly based manufacturing sector. Glass making, flour milling, brewing, and the luxury trades all expanded significantly. Wool production for the domestic market remained important in the towns of Munster and Leinster, while cotton grew rapidly in the last decades of the century. Most important of all was the growth of linen, which by the end of the century had expanded far beyond its original heartland in Ulster and accounted for more than half of all Irish exports.

Linen remained largely a cottage‐based industry until well into the 19th century, although bleaching and finishing had become more centralized during the 18th century. Cotton spinning in contrast had already become quite mechanized by the end of the 18th century, and its concentration around Belfast initiated the first phase of industrialization in the city. However, most of the cotton industry in Belfast (and in the rest of the country) succumbed ultimately to competition from the Lancashire industry. Machine spinning of linen yarn became firmly established only during the 1830s, taking over many of the factories previously used for cotton spinning. The mechanization of linen production led to a major decline over the following decades in the number of flax spinners working by hand in rural Ireland. Powerloom weaving in linen from the 1850s led to further concentration within factories in east Ulster and undermined the role of the domestic handloom weaver. The making‐up trade also developed in east Ulster, creating greater added value in the industry and intensifying the process of industrialization close to the strongholds of power spinning and weaving, while in west Ulster the shirt making industry emerged, centred largely around Derry.

In the second half of the 19th century the transport revolution facilitated an increase in trade with Britain in processed foodstuffs. Although population fell significantly, the average standard of living rose, increasing the demand for processed foodstuffs like bacon, bread, and butter, as well as for tobacco and beer. Most industrial development in the south of Ireland (outside Dublin) was geared towards producing for the home market. In Ulster, by contrast, a large proportion of industrial production was for export, particularly in the east, where the exportation of linen cloth and ships provided the backbone of the region's industrial development; Belfast also exported a range of other goods, such as whiskey, tobacco, textile machinery, and rope. British competition across the industrial sector as a whole became much more intense after the main parts of the rail network had been built between the 1840s and the 1870s. Prior to this transport costs were too high to enable British producers of heavier and less valuable goods to penetrate the Irish market.

Although employment in the Irish industrial sector declined during the second half of the 19th century, industrial output increased. Productivity in Irish industry improved as it became more capitalized and more technically sophisticated. Many craft industries declined in the face of competition from low‐priced British mass produced goods. However, this decline was more than offset by the larger industries in which Ireland began to specialize (like linen, ships, beer, spirits, tobacco, bacon, and other foodstuffs), which were generally concentrated in technically sophisticated factories producing commodities which could compete in terms of price and quality with British goods. A number of nontraded industries emerged to serve the needs of the domestic market; construction, railway engineering, printing, and flour milling are good examples of significant industries oriented almost entirely to the home market. These industries were well represented in the south where Dublin was the main industrial centre. Belfast, Ireland's only major industrial city, dominated the export trade, accounting for about two‐thirds of Ireland's industrial exports by 1907.

Northern Ireland's staple industries experienced contraction in the inter‐war period; demand for shipbuilding declined in the 1920s due to world overcapacity and competition from Scandinavia and Japan. The industry revived only with the outbreak of the Second World War. With changing fashions, linen went out of favour after the First World War, resulting in the beginning of a permanent decline in Northern Ireland's staple industry. After a brief upturn in the 1960s, Northern Ireland's industrial base contracted significantly, and its traditional role as the major industrial centre on the island has been eclipsed by industrial expansion in the south.

In independent Ireland attempts to boost the low degree of industrial development through protectionist measures intensified under Fianna Fáil after 1932. While there were some short‐term employment gains from this policy, its long‐term impact on industrial development was limited. A greater degree of industrial expansion took place following the abandonment of protectionism in the 1960s (see economic development). Much of this growth was achieved by encouraging export‐oriented multinationals to locate in Ireland, and such firms continue to account for a large share of industrial employment, exports, and output.

Bibliography

Cullen, L. , An Economic History of Ireland since 1660 (1972)
Gillespie, Raymond , The Transformation of the Irish Economy, 1550–1700 (1991)
Kennedy, L. , The Modern Industrialisation of Ireland 1940–1988 (1989)
Ó Gráda, C. , Ireland: A New Economic History 1780–1939 (1994)

TB,/RG,/ and Terry Barry

Manufacturing

AISIN SEIKI CO., LTD.

ALFA-LAVAL AB

ARMSTRONG WORLD INDUSTRIES, INC.

ATLAS COPCO AB

BAKER HUGHES INCORPORATED

BALLY MANUFACTURING CORPORATION

BICC PLC

THE BLACK & DECKER CORPORATION

BORG-WARNER CORPORATION

BRUNSWICK CORPORATION

CARL-ZEISS-STIFTUNG

CASIO COMPUTER CO., LTD.

CATERPILLAR INC.

CITIZEN WATCH CO., LTD.

DAEWOO GROUP

DAIKIN INDUSTRIES, LTD.

DEERE & COMPANY

DEUTSCHE BABCOCK AG

DOVER CORPORATION

DRESSER INDUSTRIES, INC.

EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY

ELECTROLUX GROUP

FANUC LTD.

FLEETWOOD ENTERPRISES, INC.

FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD.

THE FURUKAWA ELECTRIC CO., LTD.

GKN PLC

HALLIBURTON COMPANY

HANSON PLC

HASBRO, INC.

HAWKER SIDDELEY GROUP PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY

THE HENLEY GROUP, INC.

HITACHI ZOSEN CORPORATION

HYUNDAI GROUP

ILLINOIS TOOL WORKS INC.

INCHCAPE PLC

INGERSOLL-RAND COMPANY

INTERCO INCORPORATED

ISHIKAWAJIMA-HARIMA HEAVY INDUSTRIES CO., LTD.

JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC.

KAWASAKI HEAVY INDUSTRIES, LTD.

KHD KONZERN

KOMATSU LTD.

KONICA CORPORATION

KUBOTA CORPORATION

LUCAS INDUSTRIES PLC

MCDERMOTT INTERNATIONAL, INC.

MAN AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT

MANNESMANN AG

MASCO CORPORATION

MAYTAG CORPORATION

MINOLTA CAMERA CO., LTD

MITSUBISHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES, LTD.

NHK SPRING CO., LTD.

NIKON CORPORATION

NINTENDO CO., LTD.

NIPPON SEIKO K.K.

NIPPONDENSO CO., LTD.

NTN CORPORATION

OUTBOARD MARINE CORPORATION

PARKER HANNIFIN CORPORATION

PIONEER ELECTRONIC CORPORATION

POLAROID CORPORATION

PREMARK INTERNTIONAL, INC.

RUBBERMAID INCORPORATED

SCHLUMBERGER LIMITED

SEIKO CORPORATION

AKTIEBOLAGET SKF

THE STANLEY WORKS

SULZER BROTHERS LIMITED (GEBRÜDER SULZER AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT)

SUMITOMO HEAVY INDUSTRIES, LTD.

TOYODA AUTOMATIC LOOM WORKS, LTD.

TRINOVA CORPORATION

TYCO LABORATORIES, INC.

VALMET CORPORATION (VALMET OY)

VARITY CORPORATION

WHIRLPOOL CORPORATION

YAMAHA CORPORATION

MANUFACTURES

Items of trade that have been transformed from raw materials, either by labor, art, skill, or machine into finished articles that have new forms, qualities, or properties.

For example, a blouse that is made of raw silk would be considered a manufacture, whereas fresh vegetables sold on a farm would not.

Whether particular products are within the definition of manufactures becomes significant with respect to taxes and other regulations imposed upon manufacturers.

manufacturing profit/loss (production profit/loss) The difference between the value of the goods transferred from a manufacturing account to a trading account at a price other than the cost of goods manufactured, and the cost of goods manufactured. This difference is measured in organizations wishing to submit the production department to market prices; it involves crediting production according to some formula, such as a price per unit.

manufacturing The making of articles and goods for sale as commodities. Manufacturing makes up the greater part of what is sometimes referred to as the secondary sector of the economy. See also FACTORY SYSTEM; INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.