At this year’s International Manufacturing Technology Show, IMT surveyed a number of vendors and attendees to get their take on the biggest challenge facing U.S. manufacturing and its workforce. Responses were as diverse as the respondents’ roles in industry.

Industries around the world are struggling with ways to recover from, or at least navigate, a volatile economic landscape. It is more important than ever for manufacturers to put into place the fundamentals underpinning growth and development.

Since the last International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), in 2008, the economy’s impact on demand, production and employment has remained the biggest story in manufacturing. Belt-tightening remains a necessity and industrial companies continue to take a hard look at their priorities, with many re-examining their business model in light of unprecedented challenges.

At this year’s IMTS, more than 1,100 companies occupied 1.2 million net square feet of exhibit space in Chicago, Ill. In addition to providing daily highlights of the show, IMT surveyed a number of vendors and attendees** to get their take on a simple question that yielded not-so-simple replies:

What is the biggest challenge facing U.S. manufacturing and its workforce?

“There are certainly many challenges, but being competitive in a global marketplace is certainly one of the main challenges.” -James Cooper, VP of sales and marketing, KUKA Robotics Corporation

“Because I’m on the service end of it, I have seen rebuilding and replacing — not technically replacing old saws, but fixing and maintaining them and bringing older saws up to date — I have seen service on the rise over the last five years. Other people might tell you different, but as of this year, I’m seeing a lot more new equipment being out on the market…but generally people are holding onto their money, fixing things they’ve had for years.

For example, with our line, a band saw is a band saw — you just add more bells and whistles on them — but the concept and theories are still the same, so they’re just replacing and fixing what they have. But I feel that, within the last year, things are steadily on the rise.” -Brent Hallsted, owner and technical engineer, Band Saw Tech & Machines

“Accepting change for product, process and process improvements to meet the global requirements.” -Ed Galen, director of business development and research, Cinetic Landis Grinding Corp.

“The biggest challenge is trying to produce quality products in a shorter period of time, at less cost — quicker time-to-market. People demand stuff sooner. A new product comes out and it needs to get to market as quickly as possible. Consumers don’t want to wait for it. The competition is trying to do it quicker, faster. And I don’t think it’s competition from overseas and China as much as it has been in the past. We’re finding out in our industry that the goods coming out of China are not as good in quality, and people are starting to come back here.” -Jay Murray, VP of sales and marketing, Met-L-Flo Inc.

“Reducing scrap and labor costs [in manufacturing]…but if you improve efficiency, overall you improve your bottom line, so I think that’s a very important thing that’s always discussed when we have to sell capital equipment.” -Dave Watson, Northeast technical representative, LASAG Industrial Lasers

“I believe the biggest obstacle or challenge facing U.S. manufacturing and its workforce is the common belief that inexpensive manufacturing must be done outside of North America, outside of the U.S. I don’t believe that that is true, and I believe that we need to continue to look at new technologies and new capabilities in order to stay competitive in the global market.

We really need to look at the quality performance of what we can do with new technologies, to perpetually increase the batch runs that we’re able to do. We can’t just be consumers of large-batch products that are manufactured overseas; we need to be driving toward becoming the manufacturers of them. In the long run, the U.S. will be in a lot of trouble if we give up on large batch runs.” -Chip Burnham, VP of marketing, Flow International Corporation

“The customers I have in Indiana primarily do a lot of tool and die mold or plastic projection molding manufacturing-type work. And a lot of that work has gone to China, but it is coming back due to delivery issues. Those are some of the concerns that face my customers, and so it’s encouraging that a lot of what went to China is now coming back.” -Dan Bettner, territory sales manager, aci Machine Tool Sales and Service

“I believe that the biggest challenge is to stem the tide of offshoring and increase the trend toward reshoring — toward bringing the manufacturing work, jobs, production back to the U.S. The organization I lead, the Reshoring Initiative [found at ReshoreNow.org], provides the tools for larger companies to better understand their total cost of ownership, their total cost of offshoring. Surveys show that when they [understand these costs], they’ll understand that offshoring costs them 20 percent more than they currently believe it does. When they understand that, they’ll likely understand that bringing the work back to the U.S.: 1) will be in their interests financially, as well as in the interest of the job shops and others that do the work for them; 2) will strengthen the country; 3) will reduce the trade deficit; 4) reduce the budget deficit; 5) reduce unemployment; and 6) make the U.S. overall a better, more secure, more productive and more profitable place to live.

Many people are trying to get the Chinese to raise their currency and do other things…policy methods to improve our trade deficit and to achieve the reshoring that I described. And I think that’s fine, but the program that I represent…is a non-protectionist, industry-led way for companies to do something right now for big companies to make the right decision in their own interest, and for smaller job shops to take the materials to the bigger companies and help convince the bigger companies that it’s in their own interest to buy locally. So, instead of protectionism, instead of waiting for the politicians to finally do something, this is something that manufacturers together can do right now.” -Harry Moser, Chairman Emeritus at Agie Charmilles and founder/leader of the Reshoring Initiative

“Ingenuity and making things — that’s the story we tell in our museum [found at AmericanPrecision.org]. We think that’s the story that can come to life again. In our partnership with our local tech education center and our local high school…what we hear from the companies in our area, it’s hard for them to find well-trained workers who want to enter the industry, even though there are really good jobs. To some degree, I think getting people to come into the industry is almost a marketing challenge. Younger people just don’t value it, or they don’t understand it, or they don’t think it’s good for them. Yet, clearly, it’s a very highly skilled job — with lots of interesting challenges — doing something that’s of great value.” -Ann Lawless, executive director, American Precision Museum

“In regards to technology and the workforce, the biggest challenge that we face in manufacturing today is that we have a recession that we’re still trying to come out of. At the same time, we’re trying to find people who are confident enough in the economy to invest in new technology and then also get the funds from the banks to get that technology into the shops, [for them to] really take a leap and say we’re going to invest in the future of this business. That’s something that’s very challenging today.

In terms of the workforce, specifically, there have been many studies done showing how our workforce in manufacturing is aging. The average person working in the shop is 55 years old, and there isn’t anybody coming up who wants to do that work. I don’t send my kids to college and say, ‘Hey, I want you to work in a job shop someday,’ you know? It’s not something we push as a society, although it’s a huge industry and a lot of people can make a lot of money doing what they do in this business. So, I think the challenge for the workforce is education, getting young people excited about the future and what can be done in this industry. That’s, I think, a big challenge for this entire industry and something nobody really invests in.” -Patrick Simon, marketing manager, Mitsubishi EDM

“One of the things that I see is that there is the decline of the older workforce, which has a lot of knowledge about how these machines and equipment work. And the younger generation…they don’t have the years of experience, and they expect that information to be at their fingertips. So, if equipment fails, or there’s a problem, they’re expecting more of that information to be on the iPhone; the younger generation get[s] so many of their answers from the screens of the device…the mobile device that checks them into their airplane flight or whatever.

So, it seems to me that as the workforce gets younger, they’re expecting more services from equipment builders, they’re expecting more information to be at their fingertips, and maybe they don’t have that hands-on craftsman type of skill-set that the older workforce has. So, as the craftsmen and the people that have ‘grown up,’ if you will, in the plant, start to retire, we’re going to have to get knowledge and information to the fingertips of the younger workforce who expect that to help them do their job.” -Don Korfhage, president, iGear

“We manufacture micro machines, and from what I’ve seen from our vendors, [a big challenge] is the ability to bring on skilled labor. A lot of the machine shops that have been around and have kind of been decimated have lost that skill-set. The people who are around are not getting that skill-set; those people have moved on to something else more stable because they’ve been through the up and down. So, [the struggle] I see for our vendors is the higher capability of the machinist — the operators of the machines.

We’ve been in the business for about eight years and have seen consistent growth in the U.S. for micro manufacturing. There are challenges overall, but I think the niche markets are going to grow because we have to embrace something. Traditional manufacturing, I think, has moved off for a bit, but I think there’s still enough of it here that we need to keep pushing forward.” -Jerry Mraz, general manager, SmalTec

“One of the biggest challenges in manufacturing today is training: training to encapsulate the best practices within organizations — and, with more and more companies becoming globalized, having the best practices used across the organization and improving their productivity. I think that’s the biggest challenge now.” -Sunil P., product-marketing director and sales, Geometric Ltd.

“Machines like these — you know, Swiss-type lathes — are very technical machines that take a lot of skill to set up and run, to be very productive with, and it’s getting ever more difficult to find skilled operators who can set up and run the machine and optimize the process and really focus on making assets like these as productive as they should be.” -Jeff Bougher, president, M4 Sciences

“Challenges are economic and political, because we’re overextended. At the same time, people with resources…I was taking pictures of a display, and a guy, a manufacturer from Connecticut saw I was taking a picture, and shook his head and said, ‘I can’t believe they spent $8 million on this display. I can’t justify it. I couldn’t do it.’ But it’s a good sign that there is the activity and vitality in this building, in what’s going on in this show. That’s a very positive sign.” -E. Hubbard Yonkers, president of Innodyne, Inc. and trustee of the American Precision Museum

** Opinions expressed above are the respondents’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of respondents’ employers.