Worcester manufacturer Saint-Gobain makes "more than 250,000 types and sizes of bonded abrasives - most of them customized - for everything from highly technical precision manufacturing solutions to home improvement projects." They're working on a major capital investment campaign to better serve customers in the steel, automotive, and aerospace industries, according to the Worcester Business Journal's July 5, 2016 article "Saint-Gobain Abrasives making capital investments."

Vice President of Saint-Gobain Abrasives North America Bradley H. Johnson says "abrasives play an important part in our daily lives as consumers, whether it's sandpaper for sanding furniture and preparing walls for painting, saw blades used to cut concrete and stone for our homes knife sharpening, or discs to polish cars to a flawless finish." 

With manufacturing facilities in 27 countries, Saint-Gobain has a research and development center right here in central Massachusetts in Northborough.

A weaker US dollar makes a stronger US economy. In "Weaker dollar boosts US manufacturing," the Associated Press reported growth in the manufacturing sector from April to May after a slump from October through February. The culprit for the slump? "A strong dollar that made U.S. products more expensive in foreign markets. The dollar has fallen against other major currencies since the end of January, giving factories some relief."

Looking to a better job market and consumers' ability to spend more as an indicator, economists "expect the growth rate to rise to perhaps 2.5 percent in the second quarter."

In preparation for visiting current and potential customers in Mexico earlier this month, we translated our marketing materials to Spanish:
Our website in Spanish
Our product guide in Spanish

Our goal: to expand our international customer base and to figure out what specific needs each customer region has.

Next up: website translations in French, German, and Portuguese.

3D printing won't replace traditional manufacturing anytime soon says reporter Drew Turney in his TechRadar article "How 3D printing to order is changing manufacturing."

"If you can mass produce a spoon out of metal stamping, 3D printing isn't going to compete with that for a number of years," he says. What 3D printing can compete with: customized parts in low volume such as out-of-circulation spare parts.

"The costs of more accurate machines will be prohibitive to entry into the consumer market for the foreseeable future," adds Turney. "Of course, in many ways only one thing will drive change, and that's the price of goods.... Along with... ease of use, low financial and technological barriers to entry are giving small 3D printing operators a whole new world to discover."

"Made in the USA" means "all significant parts and processing that go into the product must be of US origin. That is, the product should contain no — or negligible — foreign content,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. The writer of "American Made: What is it & why it matters" reveals what "Made in the USA" really means:

1. We keep jobs in the U.S.. U.S. manufacturing plummeted from employing 19 million at its height to 12 million today, according to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What's promising is that for every manufacturing job created, approximately 1.6 jobs get created due to the ripple effect through suppliers and customers. For example, "in order to create one baseball bat there are: loggers to cut trees, truck drivers to deliver them to the mill, mill workers to create billets, truck drivers to deliver them to the factory to manufacture the bats, marketers to market them, and retailers to sell them."
2. We stay competitive. "Manufacturers in the U.S. perform two-thirds of all private sector R&D in the nation, driving more innovation than any other sector" (NAM). Innovation means the U.S. remains a leader in manufacturing.

To improve lead times for you and cut inventory costs to bring you better prices, we're implementing pull manufacturing. Right now, we're working on a plan to reduce our WIP (work in process) from 14 weeks to one or less. So from the time you email us with your order to the time your order leaves our shipping dock, your parts will flow through our plant in one week or less. We'll do the same with our eight remaining product lines and then implement the entire system. 

The result: shorter lead times and lower prices for you.