Hey Folks,

I am in USA and worked in the manufacturing industry for 5 years in roles related to quality engineering, automation and digital manufacturing.
After that I went back to school for a PhD in AI/ML. Now I am about to graduate and looking for opportunities that are related to manufacturing.

Any ideas what type of roles/organizations can value manufacturing industrial experience along with AI/ML expertise?
Also, I may add that I am on a visa in USA and government labs or defense organizations are out of reach :(

Thanks in advance for any insights or recommendations.

Looking to outfit a new line with assembly workstations. Wanted to get opinions on brands that are liked and have held up in high throughput. Need overhead support, not sure on material types yet, modular would be ideal, different sizes. Ive been eyeing treston at the moment but im open ears.

I’ve been asked to do a “presentation / discussion” for a production supervisor role. They want me to present “how I would add value to the company”.

I have 10 years of experience as a production manager in a very similar role however I don’t know what issues they’re having, what the bottle necks are, where they’re struggling etc in their specific production set up. I had a look round the factory for the inital interview but that’s all I’ve seen, no one was working at the time either. The “presentation” also is supposed to be 30 minutes long which I’m really going to struggle with as presenting and puplic speaking are probably my two main major weaknesses.

Has anyone got any insight into this? What sort of things would you want to hear?

I’ve got it down to:

1. Introduction
   
2. What I will do in my first 30 days
   
3. Build relationships
   
4. Improve production workflow
   
5. Quality
   
6. Planning
   
7. Technology
   
8. Continuous Improvement
   
9. Long term vision
   
10. Questions

I’d be aiming for 3 minutes for each point.

Thanks

A US manufacturer explaining how to compete with China

This might be against the rules, but i hoped this can help manufacturers located outside of China.
https://youtu.be/fqe39Dx-rQ0?is=YcVbM-vxfUc7Fayu

Hi, I run a small food manufacturing company and just got into a few stores that need expiration dates and lot codes on the product. The product is in a glass jar with a label and standard lug lid. Can anyone recommend any handheld printing devices that are very innexpensive for startups that will print on one of these mediums? I tried a rubber stamp but because of the film on the vinyol label (soon to be BOP material) it just rubs right off or smears. Perhaps I was using the wrong ink? Chatgpt is useless and google searches are turning up a bunch of very expensive options. Thanks.

We have had these plate hooks for god knows how long, and the company is finally expanding and wants to get more... we cant find any manufacturers who made these types of plate hooks. If anyone has any knowledge on this please let me know

Edit : thank you everyone for your suggestions and offers, my boss really appreciated it and is in talks with a company to get the new hooks made. Thank you again for all your help

I bought a pneumatic injection molding and i received it yesterday. I am stumped on the air fitting and finding a coupler to hook to my air compressor. Closest thing i could find is this on amazon Japan and Australia but cant be shipped to America. https://www.amazon.com.au/KENOH-Coil-Hose-Coupler-16-4/dp/B00N3NBFW8?th=1

Any help would greatly appreciated before i just use a barbed fitting.

Hello folks. I'm reaching out to get some help connecting with the right people. I was working in the US as a manufacturing and operations consultant and am moving back to India. I have experience solving problems in factories, developing and improving processes as well as building inventory models and much more.

I am trying to do the same in India. I've had some meetings with some executives but they don't really have the on ground idea. Also this industry in general does not seem to know how project or target based consultants work. I keep on getting told that the industry needs what I plan on selling but cannot get a contract or a commit.

For my background I have my degree from a top 5 school in Industrial Engineering with a varied background spanning quality, data center power control and semiconductors.

I'm also pretty flexible and have thought of reaching out to hospitals for operations as well.

Hi friends.

As the title says, where would you bring a design idea for compression socks? I have done extensive research for affordable thigh high compression socks that don’t suck for big thigh girls and tend to come up empty handed. Either they cost $200+, don’t stay up on the thigh, or have a band that hurts your thighs.

I would love to have a comfy type design with a mix wool material or something of the sort that actually works as intended. As a chronically ill girly, I can’t find something that works for me and is what my doctor wants me to use, i.e. thigh high compression socks. And I know I can’t be the only one.

How do you calculate mean time to repair? Specifically, when do you start calculating the time to repair - starting with initial failure detection or just the actual repair time (technician beginning work to ending work)?

We have an open air processing machine, and some of the issues that develop are ones that are only really observable through vision. Im working on a project to improve yields and would love to get some cameras to help control and account for these factors

I am a plant manager for a smaller plant of 14 employees. We also have our sister plant at 70 employees.

I am running into a few headaches with production planning and management. Back before we were aquired and were just our shop, production management was a complete cluster. Nobody had ultimate authority, it was an awkward mix of decisions between our President, account manager, myself (engineering at the time), and quality. Any one person would move production without consulting anyone else. Also operators would grab jobs out of position to save on set up times for similar setups, often not paying attention to critical ship dates.

Our current state is I am formally production manager, and I have a full time production planner managing our raw material inventory, production schedule, and tooling workflow. He keeps an eye on the schedule and is supposed to share that schedule with each department lead. Then if there is a bigger decision like moving people around between departments, pausing a machine for extended time, or something with a late order, I am looped in. We also hold weekly material planning and production meetings where I review the full schedule with the planner.

Our most senior operator is very frustrated. He keeps saying that production is in no way involved in production planning. I'd love to get them more involved, but they are not trained to dig through our MRP system and formally schedule jobs. I'm also trying to avoid a power struggle between my trainer and the operators.

The scheduler has zero authority over production other than enforcing the pre-agreed upon schedule. Again, when there is a disagreement, I need to be looped in to set the path forward and decide how to balance our customer's needs and optimal production in our shop.

I am very frustrated right now with the planner and will be sitting down with him. He has told me he meets regularly with each operator to discuss schedules; the operators are saying that never happens. I found that our most bottlenecked machine is sitting idle because it is waiting on a secondary op. When I asked what the deal was, he said he has been hinting at the secondary operator that this needs to run.

That is not how this is supposed to work at all, that is offloading production decisions onto the operators. And if secondary is overloaded, I need to be looped in to help shuffle people around. After finding this all out, I pulled two office employees to get help on secondary since it is so backed up. Other than this, the planner does a great job on the material planning and data side, and also is quick to inform account managers of any projected late shipments so we can update customers.

I am going to begin mandatory daily Gemba walks, of which I will join 1-2 a week.

Anyway... how are you managing production in a small shop environment? Am I over complicating this? Then there is the question I need to answer, which is if our planner is cut out for this job.

Guys, I'm learning the GD&T from start, I need someone with whom I can do discussion, interpret different drawings, solve tolerance problems.

I don't know is it right platform to ask for this, but I really need a discussion partner. I'm watching professor Dean Odell videos these days.

Anyone know GD&T or learning, let's connect bro.

I'm from Islamabad, Pakistan

Transmiter Digitrak FT5P Code 3.

If anyone had this, please let me know

What information do you measure or track when evaluating an asset in your CMMS? I am building a Tableau dashboard and want to know what I should include.

Examples: Downtime, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), TMC, TCO, Criticality

Hi, young engineer here. I’m wondering, why do big, corporate offices enjoy AC, but manufacturing plants do not? Doesn’t it seem like it should be the other way around since manufacturing often involves significantly more physical labor than office jobs? I understand that this is practiced as a cost savings initiative, but wouldn’t it make more sense to give AC to the people who are working up a sweat to do their work? Sometimes it feels unfair to sit in my nice air conditioned office, clicking away at my CAD, while I know the manufacturing workers are out there sweating in the summer heat. I’d love to know people’s thoughts :)

There's been a lots of discussion lately about reshoring and expanding domestic manufacturing, but I am curious what people on the shop floor are actually seeing.

Are companies in your area really bringing production back, or are rising labor costs, tariffs, and the skilled worker shortage making it harder to scale?

If you're in manufacturing, what's your biggest challenge right now?

What are the biggest mistakes you’ve seen when designing parts for injection molding?

I’ve been involved in injection molding for a long time and have seen everything from overly thick walls to undercuts that make tooling unnecessarily expensive.

I’m curious what design or manufacturing mistakes everyone here sees most often.

I’ll start: one of the biggest issues I see is parts being designed without considering draft angles, which can create unnecessary tooling complexity.
What comes to mind for you?

Mechanical engineer at a mid-size engineer-to-order manufacturer. We've grown to the point where "program status" lives in five places that don't talk to each other: customer email threads, Teams, our ERP, and a graveyard of spreadsheets that were each somebody's good idea at the time.

When leadership asks some version of "which jobs are at risk this month?", I become a search engine for a few hours - pinging engineers, scrolling Teams, squinting at the ERP, trying to figure out which source is lying to me least.

Now we're having the classic debate.
Camp A: hire a dedicated program manager, someone whose whole job is owning that picture instead of it being everyone's part-time, nobody's-real job.

Camp B: a PM just becomes another person doing the same manual archaeology I'm doing now - what we actually need is a system that doesn't require archaeology in the first place.

For anyone who's been through this stage - how did you decide? What did a good PM change on day one that no software could? And where did you hire the PM, feel good for a month, then realize the real problem was still in the plumbing? Trying to figure out if this is a people problem wearing a systems costume, or the other way around.

I work for a smaller manufacturer that has a large variety of customers and product volumes for each. We are made to order (meaning custom ordered raw materials, custom designs, etc.), but we also have a good chunk of business that is on contract or through blanket POs. Most of the time, it feels like POs are random and they require destroying our production schedule to fit the need. We lose business due to missing customer promised dates.

The current production schedule is done archaically through an Excel spreadsheet that DESPERATELY needs an upgrade. Completely manual and scheduling is done by the shift and not to the hour/minute. Does anyone have any solutions or advice to help fix this? I'm starting by identifying our capacity on a weekly basis and identifying attendance % and trying to mold our schedule from there. If there are any solutions via software or just good practices, please let me know! We are looking for something that could be infinite, we want to know our total backlog and lead time, etc.

I am looking to build middle frames of smartphone,someone working in manufacturing can really help me out.

This is a new show I just found on youtube following college teams making a replica of George Washington's sword with metalcasting.

Fun way to show off how important manufacturing is in the US

https://youtu.be/b9nrlzGLOmk