AMP Sparks Strategies for Advanced Manufacturing
AKRON, Ohio -- A consortium composed of academic, labor, government, and business leaders is working to develop a long-range plan to reshape the landscape of American manufacturing.
The initiative, known as the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership 2.0, or AMP 2.0, is an effort President Obama launched to encourage cooperation among private industry, government and academia that would allow for more technological innovation and workforce development in the manufacturing sector.
“We’ve been given the responsibility of implementing recommendations, and also for identifying additional strategies for U.S. leadership in emerging technologies,” says Luis Proenza, president of the University of Akron and one of 19 members of the AMP 2.0 steering committee the White House formed last year.
The University of Akron and the United Steelworkers union co-hosted a regional AMP 2.0 workshop and summit earlier this month at the university’s InfoCision Stadium, which drew some 200 representatives from private industry, government, labor and academia. Similar workshops were held across the country the same day. Future sessions are planned at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Five teams composed of about 50 members are to report to Obama in June on the strengths and weaknesses of American manufacturing and prepare a plan of action to improve and address issues confronting the sector. These teams will focus on five subsets of U.S. manufacturing: emerging technologies, workforce development, “scale-up” policies, the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation, and the image of manufacturing and engagement.
Proenza says northeastern Ohio has a tradition steeped in manufacturing, and ranks among the top-five states related to industrial production and employment.
“Twelve percent of the state’s workforce is in manufacturing and they produce 16% of the state’s output,” Proenza says. In northeastern Ohio, manufacturing employment accounts for 14% of the workforce, 19% of the gross regional product, and 23.4% of payroll, he reports.
Cooperation is needed among industries, academia, government and labor to accelerate this growth and spur additional technological advancement and job opportunities, Proenza says. “Employment in manufacturing increased 4.2% from 2010 to 2011,” Proenza says. “We’ve seen that the framework has, at its core, collaboration.”
For example, Proenza noted the University of Akron has established a significant partnership with Timken Co., one of the largest industrial companies in the world. “We’ve set up a framework to work together to commercialize technologies that would otherwise be stranded within a single company,” he says.
The partnership allows Timken to retain the proprietary rights to the technology and exclusive rights to use this technology in its core business, Proenza says. However, the technology could be transferred to manufacturing segments that are not in direct competition with Timken.
“We’ve been able to take that technology and move it to areas that are not competitive with Timken, thereby expanding manufacturing and creating new wealth,” Proenza says.
The purpose of the workshop April 2 was to share with those who attended the attributes of the “TechBelt” initiative and how this region is harnessing innovation and setting a precedent for the rest of the country. A second goal is to start a regional discussion on how to accelerate advanced manufacturing. “Thirdly, we want to provide information, feedback and guidance to the working teams so that we can fine tune the work product and implement its recommendations,” Proenza says.
As for Leo Gerard, the international president of the United Steelworkers union and a member of the president’s steering committee, the initiative boils down to a single theme. “What should it lead us to?” Gerard asks. “It should be jobs, jobs, jobs and more jobs.”
Gerard says the meaning of advanced manufacturing often gets lost in the discussion over new technologies, whether it’s 3-D printing or nanotechnology. All manufacturing in America needs to be advanced, he states.
“Traditional manufacturing is advanced manufacturing,” Gerard says. “The steel industry is a scientific industry. The steel used in all parts of manufacturing today didn’t exist 10 years ago. It’s all been re-engineered, redesigned.”
Gerard says the domestic steel industry is the most productive in the world. “We can make steel now in a little over one man-hour per ton,” he relates. In other countries, it can take up to 10 and sometimes 20 hours per ton. “In a steel mill, you see raw material go in one end and the product comes out with less than one ten-thousandth of an inch deviance. That’s advanced manufacturing.”
The Steelworkers president affirms that manufacturing is on the rebound in the United States, and that it’s imperative that the future of advanced production methods includes a program for workforce training and a plan to upgrade the country’s infrastructure.
“We can’t have infrastructure that’s coming apart,” Gerard says. More advanced materials and metals will add to the durability and duration of roads and bridges across the country, he says. And there is opportunity for advanced manufacturing to play a role in alternative energy sources such as wind and solar. “It takes 200 tons of steel to make the average wind turbine,” he notes.
The first phase of AMP, announced in 2011 by the White House, produced recommendations that included the formation of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, or NNMI. The premise was to create a series of advanced manufacturing hubs throughout the country.
America Makes: The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, based in Youngstown, was the first of these hubs.
The objective of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation is to create new spaces where industry, academia and government can form partnerships, says Michael Molnar, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, and the Advanced Manufacturing Program Office.
“The basis of NNMI is to form that place to address that missing middle, that ‘valley of death,’ ” that has long been an impediment to corporate and academic cooperation. Normally, a company would not invest the amount of money it would take over a long period of time to advance scale-up technology. “These institutes are places where the government is providing the startup money for industry-led consortia to work on transformative technologies,” he says.
Molnar says each of these institutes represent a specific need throughout manufacturing. America Makes, for example, will spearhead new technological developments in additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing, that would provide needed capabilities to the defense industry.
“The ability to not stock every part that you need in theater, a critical part – could we print something on an aircraft carrier rather than inventory it,” he explains. “Additive manufacturing is something needed by these mission agencies.”
NASA played a role in development of America Makes for the same reasons, Molnar says. “Next month, on the International Space Station
there will be a 3-D printer to make parts.”
Since America Makes was established as the pilot institution last year, three additional hubs have been created including hubs devoted to lightweight materials, digital manufacturing and design innovation, and next generation power electronics.
Four additional hubs are slated for approval this year, Molnar says.
Ultimately, the goal is to establish 45 such institutes based on the diverse needs and ideas generated from industry and academia through public workshops, Molnar says. One of those workshops, held at Cuyahoga Community College, produced more than 900 ideas for topics.
“We boiled that down into 135 topics,” Molnar says. “The list is very broad, and that’s what we’re selecting from.”
Once additional innovation hubs are designated, Molnar says, the program should produce a collective ripple effect across the entire U.S. manufacturing sector.
“The exciting thing is, not only do we think the institutes will provide value for the future of industry, when you start to get more nodes, then the network starts helping each other,” Molnar says.
This story was published in the MidApril edition of The Business Journal as part of our year-long Trending: Manufacturing series.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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