What's advanced manufacturing? staying competitive through better technology and newer techniques.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Manufacturing

It's a manufacturing buzzword, like JIT and kaizen and lean manufacturing and six sigma. And the business backers at Purdue University and elsewhere believe "advanced manufacturing" is what Indiana factories need to succeed in the long-term.

Purdue's support of the concept included an Advanced Manufacturing Summit last March. The university's Technical Assistance Program also has "advanced manufacturing personnel" on staff to help Indiana companies. So what's it all about?

"We have a definition that we use at Purdue: 'Developing competitiveness through the utilization of modern technology, including information technology, to optimize products and processes,"' says David R. McKinnis, director of the Technical Assistance Program at Purdue. It's not just bells and whistles, McKinnis insists. "If it doesn't make you competitive, then it's not advanced. It's got to have a result."

"It's trying to look at automation of the process," adds Dave Schmitt, partner and director of the manufacturing practice at BKD LLP, CPAs and consultants, in Indianapolis. "To me it all comes back to a continuation of doing more with less, getting more efficient as you go. You can use a whole series of things, whether it be gee-whiz technology or plain old do it better, faster."

Floyd McKeag, manufacturing consultant at Harding Shymanski & Co. in Evansville, agrees that advanced manufacturing is a new spin on what really is an old goal in manufacturing. "Companies are trying to take the fat out of the organization. The fewer people that touch something, the better."

The good news for Indiana is that-despite what some detractors like to allege about behind-the-times Hoosiers-advanced manufacturing is alive and well here, according to McKinnis. It has to be, really, because so much of Indiana's manufacturing revolves around the automobile, and automakers are very demanding of themselves and their suppliers when it comes to state-of-the-art manufacturing.

"About one-third of the manufacturers in Indiana are in automotive or the transportation sector," McKinnis observes, pointing to such major players as the Toyota, General Motors, Subaru-Isuzu and AM General assembly plants, plus Navistar, Cummins, Caterpillar and countless smaller suppliers. "That sector is very advanced and very productive, using sophisticated equipment for production and manufacturing."

It's not the only sector already well-versed in advanced manufacturing, McKinnis adds. "Other sectors that are very...