The conventional wisdom is that American manufacturing cannot compete on cost as our labor is too expensive. A factory worker in Ohio will never be as cheap as one in Shenzhen. Bryon Hargis (Bryon Hargis) thinks this misses the point entirely. "In aerospace, the thing that costs money is... everybody's time," he said. Cut the time, and the cost follows. Not by paying workers less, but by designing systems that need less labor to build: fewer steps, higher yield, parts that can only go together one correct way. The problem is that America has spent decades doing the opposite. Its development process is so labor-intensive that it is approaching the limit of what it can afford to build at all.show more

I spent the early part of my career at GM working in automotive right after they acquired Hughes Aircraft. I spend most of my first decade working on a team with engineers from both automotive and aerospace. The rules of thumb in each industry were wildly different. The single biggest difference was how engineering time and production costs were handled by default. Aerospace was optimized for high-performance, low-volume production. By default they added cost to minimize engineering, validation, and manufacturing costs. The assumption was that high engineering costs would overwhelm the final production costs. Automotive was optimized for mid-performance, high-volume production runs. Almost any engineering cost was acceptable if it dropped final product and manufacturing cost. The assumption was that high production would make the NRE a small part of the final cost. The best example of this kind of culture clash came up in a design review. The engineers from the aerospace background designed a weatherproof enclosure for high voltage electronics. The default automotive choice would have been cheap steel screws and designing to minimize corrosion. The default aerospace choice was stainless steel screws. Needless to say the discussion that followed was educational.... I also got to work with startups involved in the same program. Their default was minimize engineering time, minimize cost and live with risk of a failure.... It was move fast and break things before that was a term.

@hargsb Fewer steps, higher yield, parts that only fit one way. That's a design philosophy, not just manufacturing. Most institutions build the opposite: complexity as a proxy for rigour. It's not. It's just expensive.

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@hargsb less labor, more speed, that's the real competitive edge

@hargsb ill pay the extra since USA made as a rule always is of quality and last longer, in my opinion

@hargsb 产品更复杂也不行就开始降低运费

@hargsb It is the USD-CNY rate that does the trick