Summit highlights U.S. manufacturing strengths

Manufacturing is not dead, nor is it doing as poorly as people tend to think. That seemed to be the theme of Bryant University’s 22nd annual World Trade Day last week.
The industry makes up 12 percent of the United States’ $12 trillion gross domestic product, said Albert Fink, former assistant U.S. secretary for manufacturing and services and keynote speaker at the event. And manufacturing employs 11 percent of the U.S. work force, which drives the country’s service sector, he said.
Fink told his audience about Fabrica International, the carpet manufacturing company he started in California in 1974. Only 15 percent of the company’s business involved manufacturing. That drove the remaining 85 percent, which was services.
Raymond Fogarty, director of the John H. Chafee Center for International Business at Bryant, built on Fink’s idea that manufacturing drives the service sector by citing Rhode Island statistics. The state’s manufacturing industry supplies about 55,000 jobs. But each manufacturing job creates two jobs in other sectors, mainly service.
That makes manufacturing roughly one-fifth of total employment for the state if including the direct and indirect jobs.
Fink also noted that the United States is still the largest exporter in the world, and that two-thirds of those exports are manufactured products. But that doesn’t mean that more manufacturers shouldn’t think about exporting, he said.
“We need small to medium-sized manufacturers to get in the trade business,” he said. “The world is getting smaller, and trade between countries is growing at lightning speed.”
Fink said despite the major hit manufacturers have taken since the 1990s, when a large chunk of production was outsourced oversees, productivity is good. That means manufacturers are doing more with less.
U.S. exports are up 14 percent compared with this time last year, Fogarty added. And Rhode Island exports are up 20 percent.
The advantage domestic manufacturers are said to have over foreign competitors is value-added products, branding/ marketing know-how and development of intellectual property.
That’s the good news.
But Fink said the No. 1 issue he has heard manufacturers struggle with is the “current and future shortage of qualified workers.”
“There is a misconception that manufacturing jobs are dangerous, dirty and going away,” he said. “And parents are the primary driver of that misconception.”
This is the first year World Trade Day included a manufacturers’ showcase, a trade show-like exhibition featuring about two dozen Rhode Island companies.
Part of the reason the event’s planning board thought that would be a good idea was because of the misconceptions about manufacturing, Fogarty said. “We wanted to show that manufacturers are alive and well,” he said. “We wanted to show the future work force that manufacturing [produces] well-paying jobs.”
In addition, Bryant hired a firm to make a film of the hour-long showcase. The movie, “Manufacturing Matters,” will be composed of interviews with representatives of each manufacturer represented.
Fogarty said the film could be shown to students, other manufacturers, political leaders and legislators, as an educational tool.
Philip Styrlund, president of the Summit Group, also spoke to the morning audience on World Trade Day. But his speech was more geared toward giving manufacturers insight on what marketing/sales strategies work.
Most of the advice he gave was simple, but often overlooked by companies. Styrlund said the first step any company should take when thinking about selling product is to “always begin” with the customer. The customer wants to know what’s working for other companies, similar to theirs, in other locations.
Styrlund also encouraged the crowd to find out why their customers’ customers do business with them, to achieve a greater understanding of their customers’ needs, which can lead to ways to grow their customers’ business and make them a partner rather than just a seller.
With regard to trade, Styrlund said he sees it as a vehicle for ensuring diplomacy between nations. He travels all over the world for his job as a leader in go-to-market strategies for large companies, including Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Siemens and Xerox.
“I can tell you that governments are not working well,” he said. “Treaties are not working well. The [United Nations] is not working well. And war is not working well. One of the few things that can knit us together is trade.”
Styrlund added: “Trade matters now more than ever.”

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