Car manufacturing in China

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Manufacturing is the production of merchandise for use or sale using labour and machines, tools, chemical and biological processing, or formulation. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial design , in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such finished goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other, more complex products, such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles, or sold to wholesalers, who in turn sell them to retailers, who then sell them to end users and consumers.

Manufacturing engineering or manufacturing process are the steps through which raw materials are transformed into a final product. The manufacturing process begins with the product design, and materials specification from which the product is made. These materials are then modified through manufacturing processes to become the required part.

Modern manufacturing includes all intermediate processes required in the production and integration of a product's components. Some industries, such as semiconductor and steel manufacturers use the term fabrication instead.

The manufacturing sector is closely connected with engineering and industrial design. Examples of major manufacturers in North America include General Motors Corporation, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, General Dynamics, Boeing, Pfizer, and Precision Castparts. Examples in Europe include Volkswagen Group, Siemens, FCA and Michelin. Examples in Asia include Toyota, Yamaha, Panasonic, LG, Samsung and Tata Motors.

History and development[edit]

Finished regenerative thermal oxidizer at manufacturing plant

Assembly of Section 41 of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner

An industrial worker amidst heavy steel semi-products (KINEX BEARINGS, Bytča, Slovakia, c. 1995–2000)

A modern automobile assembly line

• In its earliest form, manufacturing was usually carried out by a single skilled artisan with assistants. Training was by apprenticeship. In much of the pre-industrial world, the guild system protected the privileges and trade secrets of urban artisans.


• Before the Industrial Revolution, most manufacturing occurred in rural areas, where household-based manufacturing served as a supplemental subsistence strategy to agriculture (and continues to do so in places). Entrepreneurs organized a number of manufacturing households into a single enterprise through the putting-out system.


• Toll manufacturing is an arrangement whereby a first firm with specialized equipment processes raw materials or semi-finished goods for a second firm.

Manufacturing systems: changes in methods of manufacturing[edit]

• Manufacturing Engineering


• Agile manufacturing


• American system of manufacturing


• British factory system of manufacturing


• Craft or guild system
  


• Fabrication


• Flexible manufacturing


• Just-in-time manufacturing


• Lean manufacturing


• 
  Mass customization (2000s) – 3D printing, design-your-own web sites for sneakers, fast fashion
  


• Mass production


• Ownership


• Packaging and labeling


• Prefabrication


• Putting-out system


• Rapid manufacturing


• Reconfigurable manufacturing system


• 
  Soviet collectivism in manufacturing


• History of numerical control

Industrial policy[edit]

Economics of manufacturing[edit]

Emerging technologies have provided some new growth in advanced manufacturing employment opportunities in the Manufacturing Belt in the United States. Manufacturing provides important material support for national infrastructure and for national defense.

On the other hand, most manufacturing may involve significant social and environmental costs. The clean-up costs of hazardous waste, for example, may outweigh the benefits of a product that creates it. Hazardous materials may expose workers to health risks. These costs are now well known and there is effort to address them by improving efficiency, reducing waste, using industrial symbiosis, and eliminating harmful chemicals.

The negative costs of manufacturing can also be addressed legally. Developed countries regulate manufacturing activity with labor laws and environmental laws. Across the globe, manufacturers can be subject to regulations and pollution taxes to offset the environmental costs of manufacturing activities. Labor unions and craft guilds have played a historic role in the negotiation of worker rights and wages. Environment laws and labor protections that are available in developed nations may not be available in the third world. Tort law and product liability impose additional costs on manufacturing. These are significant dynamics in the ongoing process, occurring over the last few decades, of manufacture-based industries relocating operations to "developing-world" economies where the costs of production are significantly lower than in "developed-world" economies.

Manufacturing and investment[edit]

Capacity utilization in manufacturing in the FRG and in the USA

Surveys and analyses of trends and issues in manufacturing and investment around the world focus on such things as:

• The nature and sources of the considerable variations that occur cross-nationally in levels of manufacturing and wider industrial-economic growth;


• Competitiveness; and


• Attractiveness to foreign direct investors.

In addition to general overviews, researchers have examined the features and factors affecting particular key aspects of manufacturing development. They have compared production and investment in a range of Western and non-Western countries and presented case studies of growth and performance in important individual industries and market-economic sectors.^[1][2]

On June 26, 2009, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, called for the United States to increase its manufacturing base employment to 20% of the workforce, commenting that the U.S. has outsourced too much in some areas and can no longer rely on the financial sector and consumer spending to drive demand.^[3] Further, while U.S. manufacturing performs well compared to the rest of the U.S. economy, research shows that it performs poorly compared to manufacturing in other high-wage countries.^[4] A total of 3.2 million – one in six U.S. manufacturing jobs – have disappeared between 2000 and 2007.^[5] In the UK, EEF the manufacturers organization has led calls for the UK economy to be rebalanced to rely less on financial services and has actively promoted the manufacturing agenda.

Countries by manufacturing output using the most recent known data[edit]

List of top 20 manufacturing countries by total value of manufacturing in US dollars for its noted year according to Worldbank.^[6][7][8]

Rank	Country/Region	Millions of $US	Year
	World	12,308,110	2016
1	China	3,590,978	2017
	European Union	2,512,108	2017
2	United States	2,160,559	2016
	Eurozone	1,931,828	2017
3	Japan	1,041,770	2016
4	Germany	759,904	2017
5	South Korea	422,065	2017
6	India	389,508	2017
7	Italy	284,297	2017
8	France	261,831	2017
9	United Kingdom	241,354	2017
10	Indonesia	204,726	2017
11	Brazil	208,735	2017
12	Mexico	196,816	2017
13	Spain	171,317	2017
14	Russia	188,013	2017
15	Canada	175,959	2014
16	Turkey	149,038	2017
17	Switzerland	123,184	2017
18	Thailand	123,220	2017
19	Ireland	97,967	2016
20	Netherlands	88,817	2017

Manufacturing processes[edit]

• List of manufacturing processes


• Manufacturing Process Management

Control[edit]

• 
  Management
  
  
  
  • List of management topics
  
  
  • Total quality management
  
  
  
  


• 
  Quality control
  
  • Six Sigma
  
  

See also[edit]

• List of largest manufacturing companies by revenue


• Industrial robot


• National Occupational Research Agenda Manufacturing Sector Council, USA


• Manufacturing engineering


• Manufacturing in the United States


• Industrial engineering


• Advanced manufacturing


• Metal fabrication


• Microfabrication


• Optics fabrication


• Semiconductor device fabrication


• Biomanufacturing


• Mesoscale Manufacturing


• Cyber manufacturing


• Taylorism/Scientific management


• Fordism

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• 
  Kalpakjian, Serope; Steven Schmid (August 2005). Manufacturing, Engineering & Technology. Prentice Hall. pp. 22–36, 951–88. ISBN 978-0-13-148965-3.
  

External links[edit]

Look up manufacturing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Manufacturing.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Manufacturing

• 
  How Everyday Things Are Made: video presentations


• Grant Thornton IBR 2008 Manufacturing industry focus


• "Manufacturing Technology Insights by CXO" (A review on Global Manufacturing Technology Industry.)


• EEF, the manufacturers' organisation – industry group representing uk manufacturers


• Manufacturing Consulting Firms Empowering aspirants to get a professional foothold


• Industry Today – Industrial and Manufacturing Methodologies


• Enabling the Digital Thread for Smart Manufacturing


• 
  Manufacturing Sector of the National Occupational Research Agenda, USA, 2018.


• 
   "Manufactures". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.