The Bi-Weekly Newsletter of the Council of Industry
October 19, 2023
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Council of Industry Updates
What's Happening in Your Association
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Annual Luncheon & Expo November 17th – FBI Cybersecurity Expert to Keynote, Leadership Certificate Recipients Recognized
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The Council of Industry’s Annual Luncheon & Member Expo will be held on Friday, November 17th at the Grandview in Poughkeepsie, NY. The Event will open with the Member Expo beginning at 11:15. The Luncheon program begins around noon with the presentation of Manufacturing Leadership Certificates to more than 40 individuals who have completed the program since last year’s event.
Lunch and a Keynote address from Michael Pollice Special Agent Strategic Partnership & Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC) Coordinator. DSAC is a public-private partnership offered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Office of Private Sector and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis that enhances communication and promotes the timely and effective exchange of security and intelligence information between the federal government and the private sector.
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First Lady Jill Biden, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Participate in DCC Mechatronics Lab Ribbon Cutting
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The First Lady’s visit to the Hudson Valley Friday was at the grand opening of a first of its kind facility in the region – a new advanced manufacturing lab at DCC, funded in part by President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan and also with funds from the County, SUNY and Empire State Development. It was a chance for the first lady, an educator herself at Northern Virginia Community College, to promote the administration’s push to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. and upstate New York.
“The new Mechatronics lab will help students get the skills they need for the growing businesses right here,” she said. “Preparing them for careers, making everything from display screens to jet engines to semiconductors. And, like I said, as a community college professor myself, I am so excited to see how this work changes people's lives.” On a tour of the state-of-the-art lab was Dutchess Community College student Andrew Sciuto. The 19-year-old is excited about getting a hands-on, quality learning experience and eventually work in the industry. “It’s great that I can learn in such a nice environment with all this nice stuff, and new stuff, instead of, you know, trying to work with old junk from like 1990,” said Sciuto.
The lab has been in the works for more than 2 years and was developed with input from Council of Industry members Onsemi, MPI, eMagin and IBM among others.
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HV Mfg Fall 2023 Edition in Production
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Ad Essentials and Maar Printers are hard at work putting the finishing touches on the fall 2023 edition of HV Mfg with publication expected in Mid-October. This edition features our Leader Q&A with Unshattered’s Kelly Lyndgaard and a profile of long time Council of Industry member Balchem Products. Other articles include a look at how demographic shifts in the region will affect the workforce, cybersecurity best practices, schools and industry partnerships in the region, and some book reviews and recommendations from some of our members and friends. The magazine will also feature news briefs and a resource guide for members.
Keep an eye on your inbox and your mailbox for your copy.
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Why Did You Choose a Career in Manufacturing? (Take IndustryWeek’s One-Question Survey)
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Some may call it "spooky season," but for us at IndustryWeek, October is Manufacturing Month, a time when companies pay special attention to their outreach with plant tours, school visits and hands-on activities. We want to hear what attracted you to manufacturing, and your age when you chose your career. We may use your answers in an upcoming story.
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For information on advertising in this and other CI publications
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Manufacturing Industry News
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2024 Is Around the Corner. Now is the Time to Prepare
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Most leaders understand the benefits of convening core team members at moments of transformative change. When a merger, buyout or reorganization materializes, there’s accepted wisdom that in-person group meetings best ensure alignment and trust with organizations and individuals—moving people forward in unison toward collective success. The reality is that these moments don’t just occur when businesses mark rare institutional milestones. A new fiscal or calendar year—with refreshed strategy and budget updates—can also necessitate team readiness work, especially amidst long periods of uncertainty.
In Q4, top executives engaged in budget planning would be wise to also focus on strategically aligning and preparing their teams to succeed in 2024, helping their enterprises leave behind the morass that characterized much of 2023 and rewrite the script for the New Year. While it’s best to engage experts in this area, leaders seeking to advance people readiness in Q4 can best approach the work using a couple of guiding principles: Alignment; Rigor and intentionality are a must; Conflicts are best prepared for, not avoided. People are not machinery.
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Don’t Overthink What Manufacturing’s Future Will Look Like
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What, exactly, is future of manufacturing we’ve been reading about for the last 15 years? Who, exactly, is defining this future? And when can we expect this future to arrive? A decade ago, analysts were worried about challenges like fragmenting customer demand, rising wages in low-cost regions and the scarcity of technological talent. A complex and uncertain business environment appeared to be driving change. Google Trends offers a view on the futures that companies were exploring. In the U.S., industrial and business big data were trending on search engines in 2011 to 2012. IoT was in vogue in 2014 to 2015. More recently it was sustainability, supply chain and resiliency.
The future of manufacturing has entered an era of continual change driven by technology. It is fueled by cloud and edge computing, AI, supercomputing GPUs and the steady pace of innovation from hyperscalers, established tech vendors and start-ups. Jan Burian, y advice is to not overthink what the future will look like — the future of manufacturing, the future of energy, the future of work, the future of living, the future of science … the future of everything!
Instead, strive to visualize your company as a resilient, customer-centric, self-learning and developing organization. Build capability to access the value of digital technology during the initial phase of its life cycle. The ability to assess, pilot and scale will remain the crucial competitive differentiator.
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Small Manufacturers Are at Risk of Cybercrime
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Even though small companies often incorrectly believe they’re not attractive targets, the computer networks of all manufacturers are at risk of ransomware attacks and other cybercrimes. “The risks out there are plentiful; that's the unfortunate part of this, and it doesn't matter what size you are, you can be on their on their list for attacks,” said Erich Kron, a security awareness advocate for KnowBe4, a cybersecurity company that emphasizes employee education.
“Manufacturing is one of the top organizations or top industries impacted by ransomware,” Kron said. “You see manufacturing, health care and local governments on there a lot, mostly because like manufacturing, health care is very time-sensitive. ... It's the same thing in manufacturing. Again, you want to get that line running. Otherwise, things get things get real ugly, real quick.” The No. 1 way bad actors get into a network is through “simple, old-fashioned email phishing,” hoping to trick at least one person into opening a file containing a virus, Kron said. Remote access, which has gained in popularity with more employees working from home and signing into work networks, presents another vulnerability.
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US Chamber of Commerce Report: Critical Thinking, Creativity and Curiosity are Skills Companies Need
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Discussions about the skills gap generally focuses on skills specific to certain industries. However, a recent report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "Data Deep Dive: The Workforce of the Future,” included information on general skills that are needed for the immediate future. The report notes that this skill update is necessary to retain current jobs as well as prepare for future jobs. The most in-demand skills now and for the future are:
- Digital Literacy
- Critical Thinking
- Emotional Intelligence
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Flexibility
- Leadership Skills
- Time Management
- Curiosity
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Mental Health Issues Soar to Number 1 Workplace Injury
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A new Atticus study found that mental health issues such as stress and anxiety are now the number one most common workplace injury, making up 52% of all workplace injury cases. And it’s not just employees. A total of 43% of middle managers also report burnout—more than any other worker group. As mental health issues are now the number one most common workplace injury, the team at Atticus surveyed 1,000 employees and collected recent data from OSHA, BLS and Google Trends to explore professionals’ mental health decline. Here are some of the key findings:
- One in 10 workers experience mental health issues due to their work.
- The highest workplace injuries (52%) are related to stress and anxiety.
- Mental health issues are 10 times more common work-related injury than chemical exposure and 8.6 times more common than head injuries.
- For comparison, 19% of employees have been physically injured at work, and 26% of them filed workers’ compensation as a result.
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NLRB Decisions Create a Catch 22 for Employers
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In a radical change from past precedent, two decisions rendered recently by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are making it virtually impossible for an employer targeted by a union to be organized to find a way to resist those efforts. On Aug. 25, the board handed down a decision in a case involving Cemex Construction Materials Pacific which allows the NLRB to order an employer to recognize a union as a collective bargaining agent absent a secret-ballot vote by its employees.
The NLRB declared that it now can order the union be accepted as the employees’ representative during an election campaign if it finds the employer has committed an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP), which is now a much greater prospect because of another board decision. That Cemex decision followed one announced by the board on Aug. 1, called Stericycle. In that ruling, the board also declared that it will consider any ULP complaint filed by a worker regarding employer attempts to resist organizing to be presumed legitimate. Combined with this work rules decision, Stericycle and Cemex end up creating a one-two punch making it virtually impossible for an employer to prevent being organized once targeted by a union.
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Generative Design in Manufacturing is Transforming the Industry
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Generative design is a technology that rapidly evaluates countless designs against project criteria, then discards suboptimal designs and highlights the best—accelerating the design process. It's a machine-learning technology that understands input engineering requirements and suggests the best ideas according to those parameters. The system can produce many iterations that meet those criteria by applying constraints for mass, strength, flexibility, or other performance metrics to the generative design algorithm.
Generative design is particularly valuable in design and manufacturing to help ideate or pivot faster and more cost-effectively. It’s also a new way of automating manufacturing for the industry. Real-world applications include advanced robotics, aerospace components, automotive components and lightweighting, architectural detailing structures, customized products, and aftermarket improvements.
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8 Ways Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Can Advance Predictive Maintenance
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Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are helping manufacturers move beyond time-based maintenance practices, aiding more proactive practices and predictive maintenance. When a maintenance team detects anomalies in their measurements, vibration for example, that means there’s already equipment degradation. AI/ML can help identify those anomalies in asset data earlier, before deterioration starts.
These advanced technologies are also paramount to breaking down siloes in the manufacturing system and processes as a whole. Here, experts at Aspen Technology share eight ways these advanced technologies will impact PdM strategies in the future including taking the place of physical inspections, collecting and historizing worker knowledge and influencing choices for capex spending.
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Companies Sharpen Their Focus on Continuous Improvement
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Productivity boomed in the second half of the 1990s, averaging 2.5% annually versus 1.5% in the five prior years. Researchers have since observed that the step up was the result of multiple factors—a tightening labor market that led companies to invest more in employee training and development as well as increased competition and innovation that was helped by IT investments, including in the early internet—that one could argue are present in today's economy.
Skanda Amarnath, executive director of the Employ America think tank, said peeling back some of the headline layers of the recent jobs report showed that investment-sensitive sectors have been consistently adding higher-paying, higher-quality jobs. “Q3 productivity could be 2% to 3.5%,” Amarnath wrote. “We usually only see those gains in productivity estimates when we’re ‘losing’ jobs.”
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2023 Counterproliferation Summit 
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Date: Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Time: 9am - 12:15pm (doors open 8:15am)
Location: SUNY Westchester Community College, 75 Grasslands Road, Valhalla, NY 10595
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) New York, in partnership with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), will be sponsoring a Counterproliferation Summit for private industry partners in the lower Hudson Valley region.
The following topics will be covered:
What to do with suspicious orders
How you can assist the US Government in stopping advanced weapons proliferation
How to prepare for ransomware and other common cyber attacks
This event is free of charge and registration is limited.
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Effective Business Communication
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Tuesday, October 24 to Wednesday, October 25
8:30 AM - 12:30 PM (EDT)
Online Classroom
Effective Business Communication is an online class from 8:30 am - 12:30 pm on 10/24 & 10/25 that is designed to enhance individual ability to effectively communicate information to others within a company.
Course content relates directly to:
- Supervisory relationships
- Co-worker dynamics
- Customer contact and dealing with managers
Participants learn usable techniques and theory for effective communication that ensures that messages are delivered and understood.
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NEW Episode of Manufacturing Matters Out Now!
John Rath, CLO of Lakeland Bank & ABM Food Bank of HV
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