AGMA Gear Industry News

Manufacturers added 6,000 workers in April, marking the fifth straight month of job gains in the sector. The manufacturing sector has hired 14,200 additional workers on net over the past five months, a notable difference from the more cautious approach to hiring seen before that. Indeed, manufacturing lost 16,000 workers in 2016 as a whole, its first negative year since the Great Recession. The good news is that business leaders are more upbeat in their economic outlook so far in 2017, with demand and production expanding modestly once again. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell from 4.5 percent in March to 4.4 percent in April, the lowest level since May 2007. In addition, nonfarm payrolls rose by 211,000 in April, higher than the consensus estimate of around 180,000 and a relatively strong rebound after just 79,000 nonfarm workers hired in March. 

Machine tool orders increased in March as some companies completed their fiscal year, the Association for Manufacturing Technology (McLean, VA) said in a monthly report. Orders for the month totaled $407.53 million, a 35 percent jump from an adjusted $302.27 million in February. March orders also rose 3.3% from $394.54 million in March 2017.

Job gains are up so far this year after being down last year. The latest industry figures released Monday show factory owners are feeling good. The ISM manufacturing index — a key measure of the industry's health — showed manufacturing grew for the eighth straight month. The index hit 54.8% in April. Any reading above 50% means the sector grew and anything below that mark means it shrunk.

Indiana’s automotive manufacturing sector is a $15.8 billion industry, employing more than 100,000 Hoosiers. It represents the state’s second largest manufacturing sector (behind chemical products) and automotive jobs have grown 40 percent since 2009, according to a 2016 report from the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and the Indiana Automotive Council.

The AGMA Strategic Resources Network Event next month, May 16-18 in Tulsa, OK, will provide high level presentations on the latest data on the energy sector, steel sector, and will have a special panel on workforce development. Additionally, registrants will have a special presentation on 3D printed metals as they pertain directly to the gear industry. This is an important event and seats are limited.

The heart of American manufacturing is in the Midwest, but that doesn’t mean it's the best place to find manufacturing jobs today. Professional networking site LinkedIn released a workforce report this week showing a more severe manufacturing skills gap in coastal cities relative to middle American metro areas.  

Over 138 million workers in the U.S. have LinkedIn profiles; over 20,000 companies in the U.S. use LinkedIn to recruit; over 3 million jobs are posted on LinkedIn in the U.S. every month; and members can add over 50,000 skills to their profiles to showcase their professional brands. That gives us unique and valuable insight into U.S. workforce trends.

Learn key factors in the inspection process that lead to better design of gears. Develop a broad understanding of the methods used to manufacture and inspect gears. Discover how the resultant information can be applied and interpreted in the design process.

Using a standardized methodology to define project quality ensures deliverables fit customer specifications and customer satisfaction when managing projects.

Apple says it intends to bolster the U.S. manufacturing sector by creating a $1 billion "advanced manufacturing fund" — with some of that initial money going toward a company the tech giant is prepared to partner with, CEO Tim Cook said. The announcement, which Cook made Wednesday on CNBC, comes after months of focus by President Donald Trump on jobs, manufacturing and the global economy.

Link3D is launching a new service to connect industrial businesses with additive manufacturers around the country. Pitching itself as a more professional alternative to 3D Hubs, Formlabs and Shapeways, Link3D is the fruit of nearly two years of work from founder and chief executive Shane Fox.

Orders for Germany's important manufacturing sector rose by more than expected in March, building on February's strong gain and indicating a pick-up in German industrial output. Manufacturing orders increased by 1.0 percent compared with a month earlier, taking account of seasonal swings and calendar effects, the economics ministry said Monday. The cyclical trend in the sector remains "favorable," it said.

As a brand name, UniCarriers is less than a decade old, dating only back to 2011. However, the company’s lineage dates back more than a century to 1914, when one of the companies now included under the UniCarriers name — Barrett, a manufacturer of manual pallet trucks — was founded. And Nissan Forklift, whose U.S. headquarters occupied the same Marengo, Ill.-based plant where UniCarriers Americas Corp. (UCA) is now based, was founded 60 years ago in Japan. And TCM, under company that’s now part of UniCarriers, began manufacturing forklifts in Japan in 1949. Clearly, a lot of the material handling history over the years has been made by UniCarriers under one name or another.

Emerson has expanded the ASCO Numatics 580 Series fieldbus electronics platform with the introduction of an IO-Link communication option. The company says the new IO-Link module is for use with the ASCO Numatics 500 Series valve islands, and will allow machine automation designers a convenient, cost effective and reliable solution for solenoid valve control through direct digital data communication with the machine controller plus the ability for event-based and I/O mapped diagnostics — both important predictive maintenance requirements for Industry 4.0.

GE and Siemens are battling each other with vastly different software strategies in a high-stakes land grab as factories quickly move their operations onto cloud-based Internet of Things platforms. As more manufacturing customers look to collect and analyze operational technology data, GE and Siemens are going in opposite directions with their respective Predix and MindSphere cloud platforms, solution providers told CRN.

Sarcos Robotics, a developer of dexterous industrial robots for use in unstructured environments, has secured $10.5 million in funding from a group of top-tier strategic investors including Caterpillar Ventures, GE Ventures, and Microsoft.

The global industrial Internet of Things (IoT) market is predicted to reach $933.62 billion by 2025—up from $109 billion in 2016, according to a report from Grand View Research, released Monday.

Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics business based in Fort Worth, Texas, recently designated 27 small and large businesses as top-performing suppliers for 2016, representing the top 2% of a supply base of 1,400 suppliers.

America’s wind power workforce installed 908 utility-scale turbines in the first quarter of 2017, totaling 2,000 megawatts (MW) of capacity. This is the wind industry’s strongest start in eight years, according to a new report released by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA, Washington, DC).

GE Aviation celebrated in Muskegon the grand opening of its $14.5 million Brilliant Factory – an investment that will stimulate economic growth in the region and where GE is using data and analytics to run its plants more efficiently.