Modern Manufacturing: Yachts...

The short documentary-style ad below gives a fascinating look into a modern manufacturing facility that makes extensive use of industrial robots.  The mix of human and robotic workers is typical, though the robots keep advancing into more and more “skilled” areas.  The benefits of this kind of manufacturing are compelling, and well presented here.  They include: precision, low waste, high speed, the synchronization that enables just-in-time manufacturing inventories, (much) lower labor costs, (much) higher “up-time”, and more.  Watch:

I, Pencil...

Leonard Reed's famous 1958 essay I, Pencil is online, so far as I'm aware for the first time.  It's a wonderful eye-opener about the complexity of modern manufacturing – and of course today manufacturing is a couple orders of magnitude more complex than when Reed wrote his essay.  It's just a few pages long; if you've never read it then you should read it now...