Posted on 07/23/2023 8:34:39 AM PDT by rod5591
Stanley Black & Decker acquired the Craftsman brand in 2017 to revitalize it and bring manufacturing back to the United States. The Fort Worth factory, announced in 2019, was meant to take this vision further by forging iconic Craftsman wrenches, ratchets, and sockets from American steel. The company believed that advanced automation would allow the plant to compete cost-effectively with imported products while meeting consumer demand for U.S.-made tools.
Former employees revealed that the factory’s automated system experienced critical problems that couldn’t be resolved before the company closed the facility. The pandemic also disrupted the production timeline, preventing proper testing of the new system at scale. Some adjustments required new tooling from overseas suppliers, causing delays of weeks. The factory struggled to achieve its production goals despite spending millions of dollars on making the machines work.
Attrition among experienced tool-making experts and turnover within Stanley’s tool division further contributed to the factory’s struggles. The absence of seasoned employees with deep knowledge of the manufacturing process hindered problem-solving efforts.
Stanley Black & Decker’s ambitious plan to automate the manufacturing of Craftsman tools in Fort Worth, Texas, faced insurmountable challenges, leading to the eventual closure of the factory. The difficulty of automating manual tasks and replicating the skills of human workers in a fully automated system became evident. While reshoring manufacturing is a growing trend, this case highlights the importance of considering the complexities of transitioning to automated processes. The search for the right balance between automation and human expertise remains a significant challenge for the tool industry and manufacturers across various sectors.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
All well and good, but did they meet DEI goals while operating?
I still have my dad’s old Craftsman wrenches, sockets and rolling toolbox, it’s red. Those rachets still work well.
The battery operated weedwacker and blower? Well they are complete crap with a Craftsman branding.
Classic. In most cases you have to walk before you can run.
But were they diverse?
More libertarian nonsense.
Does the nation require US manufactured tools, dies, steel, etc? Obviously.
So.
"Compete cost-effectively with imported products" (i.e., reduce US workers to penury and fail to incentivize Young people to learn resource extraction, refining, and manufacture)?
There's a lot easier way to fix this problem.
Hang the bankers. Close the ports to foreign imports. When they try to sneak in? Close the borders and sink the ships.
Probably will take a few more attempts before anyone really gets this right seeing as they were trying something new
It was therefore guaranteed to failure. Sounds like a scheme a consultant sold them.
you must first crawl, then stand, then walk, then run. Decades of working with German and Japanese companies taught me that automation and quality are tied to stability, culture, institutional knowledge and learning. Even Chinese follow the same process, albeit at a faster pace and with a lot of failure and waste.
Humans are still needed
Engineering plant designed by people who have no clue where the shop floor actually is and what the people on the floor actually do.
Our robotic cells are not as fast as a human, but one guy can run three robots with about a month of training. A human takes about a year to get good at the job.
Many suits think tool and die guys and manufacturing folks are a dime a dozen......it is actually the suits who are easy to replace or even run without. The people who put this project in place probably moved on before the project failed. In my experience they leverage the fact they have this massive expansion plan in place to move to a better position.
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Another unintended consequence of outsourcing
A lack of institutional knowledge among Americans
Way to go Wall Street!
Maybe when we go to war with China we'll have to outsource our tank production to them.
.... The timing couldn't have been Crappier ..... The emergence of COVID and the associated shutdowns coupled with the New World birth of the ESG and DEI Requirements to do business in the US killed that dream right on the launch pad ....
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It’s puzzling that they couldn’t make it work here. Sears Craftsman hand tools were US made. After the sell off of the brand they became Chinese made of lower quality in tests. It would be great if they can be brought back as domestic product of the classic quality.
They had Tim Allen singing their praises in his early standup routines.
I was at two companies that aged out. They’d had a hiring surge in the sixties and the bulk of their employees were held there by generous benefits and a defined benefit retirement system. As older employees saw new people coming in, they refused to pass along the knowledge that might let those employees replace them, even though they’d eventually retire, and their jobs would go unfilled. Both companies ended up making ass layoffs to get rid of older workers. Some programs and projects were lost because the people who knew how to make the items were now gone. But the companies had hired younger workers and, at this point, done away with the defined benefit retirement meaning people were going to leave more regularly and be replaced by younger workers. In both cases it was necessary but handled badly...probably because of union rules and labor agreements. Also, I think the people running the companies didn’t understand how to create processes and institutional knowledge. They were accountants and lawyers.
Close the ports to foreign imports.
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Because no one needs food or medicine, that will show ‘em!!
“ Also, I think the people running the companies didn’t understand how to create processes and institutional knowledge. They were accountants and lawyers.”
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There’s a whole lot of this happening across our nation.
I wonder if some of this failure was because they were
trying to make robots build tools that were designed to
be built by hand instead of making tools that were designed
to be built by robots?
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