Today's Manufacturing Reality

 

In many industrial sectors, the relationships and responsibilities between large Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and their suppliers are in flux. Firms are increasingly focusing their activities on their own core competencies and relying more heavily on the outside to support the rest. At the same time, shorter product life-cycles, increased product differentiation and more competitive global competition have required all firms to innovate more quickly, effectively, and efficiently which has required stronger partnerships with others. Firms must form these more “intense” collaborations within an increasingly network-centric manufacturing environment. 

 

Intense collaboration success will ultimately be based on the trust between firms since traditional “arms length” competition-based relationships have proven to be a barrier to the innovation process. As manufacturers begin switching from arms length relationships to more intensely collaborative ones, these newly formed and closely integrated “value” networks will require new types of partnerships and governance.

 

NACFAM is the leading non-partisan, non-lobbying national broker for network-centric based “intense” collaborations and relevant support mechanisms. 

 

NACFAM’s policy initiatives seek to make realistic gains for manufacturers, while recognizing the budget realities of the federal government. Therefore, NACFAM not only seeks to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing, it seeks to increase the return on U.S. public investment dollars by making manufacturing policies and programs more effective. NACFAM has tailored its four main issue areas to emphasize that in order for our nation to be innovative, so must public policy and programs. 

 

At the December 2006 NACFAM Board meeting, we established an Advisory Council structure for each of our four main issue areas as we work to broker Intense Collaboration for Network-centric Manufacturing to accelerate manufacturing innovation, a key theme of our upcoming June AMLF meeting.

 

Those issue areas are:

In the coming months, these groups will address key issues of interest to the manufacturing community and will lay the groundwork for discussion at the June 27-28 meeting and beyond. The commitment as a committee member will be participation in one or two conference calls prior to the June meeting, and review of issue documents (by email).