Yesterday I was in Chicago at the National Manufacturing Week show. I talked to the representatives of NIST about their new Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). This program is designed to assist small manufacturers with their most critical needs. More detail is at http://www.mep.nist.gov.
Some of their statistics are very interesting. Between 1992 and 2001 manufacturing productivity increased at twice that of the rest of the economy (18% for non-farm business versus nearly 36% for manufacturing). Small manufacturers account for over half the total value of U.S. production.
Unfortunately the small manufacturers are not increasing their productivity by the same rate. Between 1992 and 1997 small manufacturers productivity grew by 15.5% versus 22.6% for large.
The MEP thinks that some of the barriers for small manufacturers are:
- Limited budgets
- Lack of in-house expertise
- Lack of access to the newest technologies
Since small manufacturers account for 98.6% of all manufacturing establishments and employ 2/3 of all manufacturing personnel, this is something about which we need to be seriously concerned.