We’ve made it about midway through 2006, and after the trauma incurred to various parts of industry last year, manufacturers and enterprises are showing more confidence — particularly in technology: consumption of manufacturing technology is up, while RFID is expected to become an integral part of operations.

U.S. manufacturing technology consumption is up 18.5 percent compared to 2005, according to the Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT) and American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association (AMTD). Year-to-date total has reached more than $1.1 billion. The $255.13 million April performance figure was up 6.8 percent over the $238.85 reached in April 2005, according to Control Engineering today.

“[…] Year-to-date results are up over 18%, continuing the growth begun almost three years ago,” said John B. Byrd III, AMT President.

The figures are derived from information provided by companies participating in the U.S. Machine Tool Consumption program. The report is compiled by the AMT and AMTD, which represent the production and distribution of manufacturing technology, and provides data of domestic and imported machine tools and related equipment. Analysis of machine tool consumption is considered a reliable leading economic indicator as manufacturing industries invest in capital metalworking equipment to increase capacity and improve productivity.

As well, according to an AberdeenGroup research report announced yesterday, 50 percent of enterprises say they will have anywhere between two and 10 of their manufacturing sites RFID-enabled by 2008.

AberdeenGroup’s “The RFID Benchmark Series: Scaling RFID Implementations from Pilot to Production” report finds that more than half of the manufacturers surveyed have automated or will automate their RFID tagging processes in the next 24 months by integrating with manufacturing execution and material handling systems, as well as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC).

Further, nearly 75 percent of Gen 2 users report better-read rates and are more confident that their RFID technology won’t soon become obsolete, says the Aberdeen report.

“For the first time, reliability of RFID technology trumped cost as the leading consideration in RFID technology selection,” says John Fontanella, Sr. VP of Research. “That tells me companies expect RFID to be an integral part of operations going into the future.”

As such, companies are being forced to create strategies to better integrate RFID technologies into their overall enterprise technical infrastructure.

Additional findings in the Aberdeen research:

• An increasing number of companies plan on using network appliances and smart readers to manage RFID technology and administrative processes.

• Survey participants most aggressively adopting the RFID agree that scalability and interoperability with other enterprise technologies was crucial to its expanded use.

The AMT and AMTD also report U.S. machine tool consumption on a regional basis. Geographic breakdowns can be found here.