Manufacturing USA’s 2017 Annual Report Highlights an Interesting Trend

Late last month, Manufacturing USA released its 2017 Annual Report. For those unfamiliar with the organization, Manufacturing USA is a private-public partnership which brings together academia, private-sector manufacturing interests, and relevant federal agencies. Its stated goal is to increase the global competitiveness of the United States’ diverse manufacturing verticals by fostering the free flow of information, broadening access to funding, and establishing cross-sector cooperation. Its annual report has kept readers abreast of developments across many such verticals since the program’s 2014 inception. This year’s iteration, though, is particularly packed with information—Manufacturing USA added six new institutes last year, bringing its total to 14. There’s something in the report to appeal to followers of any niche within advanced manufacturing.

Certain sections of the report, however, deserve particular emphasis. Given the increasingly visible (and rapidly worsening) effects of climate change, two institutes dedicated to addressing this problem in manufacturing are more relevant than ever. Viewed in the context of the Trump administration’s dubious climate agenda, the domestic manufacturing sector’s work on slowing climate change becomes even more interesting, not to mention vital. While Manufacturing USA’s update has something to offer all manufacturers, its relevance for every American shines clearest through the progress of two clean energy initiatives known as CESMII and REMADE.

CESMII—An Overview           

The Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute, or CESMII, is one of Manufacturing USA’s newer institutes. Launched in late 2016, CESMII is looking to accelerate America’s transition to a connected, “smart” manufacturing landscape. Smart manufacturing, the thinking goes, will serve the dual purpose of improving the economic competitiveness of production processes and dramatically cutting energy needs. This marriage of business performance and climate sustainability makes CESMII’s agenda important to a larger audience than one with a purely economic or environmental focus could achieve. To that point, the institute counts 31 organizations across academia and nearly all manufacturing sectors among its members. Together, they plan to match the Department of Energy’s $70M commitment to fund the initiative over the next five years.

CESMII’s investment blend (in both dollar terms and human capital) reflects the understanding that both the technologies underlying smart manufacturing and human attitudes toward its adoption must be cultivated to achieve success. Within five years, for instance, the institute’s goal is to bring down the costs and time associated with integrating smart manufacturing into an existing process by more than half. To get there, CESMII will prioritize the development of advanced sensors, controls, platforms, and modeling alongside new best practices and a modern production workforce.

CESMII describes this outline as its “roadmap,” and the name is as navigational as it implies. Designed to provide a near-term framework for 2017 and 2018, the roadmap supports CESMII’s broader mission through a specific set of attainable targets. To reach these quantifiable goals, the institute will depend on the execution of its strategic objectives—also defined in the roadmap—over the course of the measuring period. For the purposes of evaluating the annual update, it makes sense to treat these categories separately.

First consider CESMII’s stated goals—those that come with a number attached. In terms of the widespread domestic integration of smart manufacturing, the institute’s clearest target is the aforementioned 50 percent reduction of the time and cost of adoption within the next five years. It also references a more nebulous desire to see “significant industry adoption” over the same time interval. Finally, CESMII wants to see its collection of member activities fully replace its initial funding from the Department of Energy in six years or less.

Other measurable targets laid out by the road map deal with energy consumption, which is extremely important both environmentally and in business terms. Improving energy efficiency by 15 percent at specific manufacturing pilot projects over the next five years is a step organizers feel will demonstrate the efficacy of the measures they’re taking. They also want to boost energy productivity by 50 percent over a longer, 10-year span.

The blueprint CESMII developed over the past year also included four strategic imperatives underpinning these specific, short-term goals. It classifies them as “business practices,” “workforce development,” “enabling technologies,” and “SM platform infrastructure.” From a business-case standpoint, CESMII recognizes that it has an important role to play in shaping the narrative surrounding smart manufacturing. Developing a playbook for integration will make it easier to convince businesses to make the leap by taking the unknown out of the picture. Also on the soft-science side of the equation is the issue of workforce development, a topic vital to the ability of the United States to widely transition to smarter manufacturing. CESMII wants to build an infrastructure that will act as an ongoing resource for the consistent training and professional development of manufacturing employees.

These goals take a wide-lens look at a wide-set problem: how to improve the business of manufacturing in the United States while simultaneously cutting energy requirements to benefit the climate. Over the course of 2017, its first full year, CESMII developed complementary targets of different scopes and timelines to ensure that it makes realistic progress on this problem in 2018 and beyond. Interestingly, another Manufacturing USA institute is taking a different approach to the same issue. Reining in American manufacturing’s carbon footprint, it seems, is a problem too big for any program to tackle alone.

Reducing Embodied-energy and Decreasing Emissions—REMADE—overlaps with CESMII in important and remarkable ways, but diverges in one key area: specificity. Rather than focus on the adoption of smart manufacturing in all industries nationwide, REMADE focuses on just one piece of the puzzle. Its mission statement is direct in saying that the development of “industrial platform technologies” is a major priority, but the goal is to apply these technologies in a focused way towards materials production and processing. In other words, it aims to reduce the environmental impacts of the domestic manufacturing sector by reforming its inputs.

REMADE is even earlier along in its development than CESMII. Originally launched in May of last year, the institute experienced immediate interest and rapid growth. Its member count stood at 32 at year-end and was similar in composition to CESMII in its mix of universities, private interests, and non-profits. The funding profile is equally comparable, with a 50-50 public-private funding split anticipated to the tune of $70 million each. Though still in its developmental infancy, REMADE has been extremely clear about its vision and how it intends to work toward that vision.

The institute is looking to leverage advanced manufacturing techniques to bring down the carbon footprint and financial expense associated with the reuse of four types of materials: metals, fibers, polymers, and electronic waste. That’s because the embodied energy of end-use products made in America tends to be astronomically high, responsible for the vast majority of manufacturing’s 25 percent share of all annual energy consumption. REMADE sees an opportunity to cut down on that energy expenditure—and the associated carbon emissions—by increasing the share of physical products that are made from secondary materials. Concurrently, it will be important to make access to such secondary feedstock affordable and the performance of these reclaimed materials on par with primary inputs through the use of technology. Those three founding principles, perhaps the most important component of the institute’s full-year report, are the overarching connection informing the rest of the steps it took in 2017.

Still in its nascency, the most significant steps taken by REMADE in 2017 involved defining itself. Specifically, the annual report notes that it filled the major leadership roles, developed a system of governance, and worked with the Department of Energy to set guidelines for members. It also prepared itself for the nuts-and-bolts R&D work to come in 2018. By codifying its plan for handling project calls and asking its constituency to submit introductory proposals, REMADE advanced the likelihood that it will make real progress on its technical challenges moving forward.

The institute also made major strides in identifying those technical challenges and mapping out a plan of action. Much like CESSMI, REMADE has chosen to organize itself along two sets of objectives organized by timing. The first set of objectives will guide its R&D efforts indefinitely; they literally are the reason for REMADE’s existence. These five development categories reflect the categories of technological progress that REMADE’s experts feel can most meaningfully reduce the embodied energy of physical products made in America. The first objective involves tailoring design of these end-use items with recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing in mind. The next looks to optimize the types of materials used themselves, including more efficient use of scrap material and better usage of secondary feedstocks. Third, the improvement of technologies that allow end-of-life products to be reclaimed more efficiently and usefully will accelerate the economic feasibility of REMADE’s mission across all manufacturing verticals. Fourth, the development of processes for fast, safe, and affordable reclaimed-material sorting and processing will help materials be collected at scale and dealt with later. And finally, the institute hopes to systematize material flow up and down the supply chain to ensure all players are making the best use of materials.

To understand why this lengthy list of related targets matters, consider the situation manufacturers face today. Worldwide demand for raw materials like paper and steel could nearly triple by 2050. Further, the U.S. is entirely dependent on foreign suppliers for 18 commodities that are commonly used in manufacturing. Given this backdrop, it could dramatically strengthen the global positioning of American manufacturers if they were able to source a higher percentage of their material inputs from home. An excellent way to accomplish that goal is dialing in the processes of reusing, remanufacturing, or recycling imported materials at the end of a product’s life.

More important than the economic (or political) potential of REMADE’s initiatives, of course, is their ability to cut the emissions that are a primary driver of climate change. By improving recycling and remanufacturing technologies, the total embodied energy of most products could be cut way down. Many estimates say that extracting and processing metals like aluminum for use in production is between 10 and 20 times more costly in terms of energy than using recycled aluminum for the same process. That’s a good example of the magnitude of gains that could be made possible through these huge projects aimed at making manufacturing smarter.

Each of Manufacturing USA’s 14 institutes does important work. Modernizing our manufacturing sector from the bottom up is a critical task for America’s economic wellbeing, and establishing technological leadership can help secure that status. The significant overlap between two of those institutes, however, is telling. REMADE and CESMII are working on projects that share far more similarities than differences. While they diverge substantially on the means to the end, the two institutes have the same vision for manufacturing. That vision is one in which economically efficient solutions to business challenges act as the vehicle by which a cleaner, more sustainable climate future may be secured for America and her global partners.