Sign in to follow this  
Followers 0
popquiz

Are Allen Bradley PLC's manufactured in the U.S.A.?

14 posts in this topic

I just read that some economists consider the manufacturing sector as the wealth producing sector of the economy and the sevice sector as the wealth consuming sector of the economy. Hmmm. Are Allen Bradley PLC's manufactured in the U.S.A.? Are any PLC's manufactured in the U.S.A.? And I don't mean assembled in the U.S.A. Edited by popquiz

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
You'll find that Rockwell Automation sources components and does manufacturing of different product lines worldwide. You can find the A-B octagon on hardware built in Germany, Switzerland, England, Singapore, Japan, China, Malaysia, Korea, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. That's just from memory. Rockwell Automation's major North American manufacturing facilities are at Twinsburg, Ohio, Milwaukee, Mequon, and Richland Center, Wisconsin, Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Cambridge, Ontario and Tecate, Mexico. Pop any ControlLogix product out of the chassis and you'll see the label shows Made in the U.S.A; Twinsburg manufactures all the ControlLogix hardware, and I think they also do PanelView Plus, computers, and most other control hardware that's built in the USA. PLC-2/3/4/5 were built there for decades. I suppose you could make an argument that designing and assembling a controller but using parts from China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Arizona, Oregon, Texas, Canada, and Germany doesn't count as "Made in the USA", but that's life in the global economy. Most market growth is happening across the Pacific, so more and more RA products are being designed and built in Singapore, where the RA factory is almost as big as Twinsburg, and builds most of the distributed I/O and the newer MicroLogix controllers. ControlLogix is the main-line controller and will always be manufactured in Ohio.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Arizona, Oregon and Texas are now part of what country?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Thank you for your very informative answer, Ken. To answer Peter, by my reckoning, if the gadgets employed by the U.S. controls industry are not manufactured in the U.S., then the U.S. controls industry, as a whole, merely provides a service to the manufacturing sector. Sure, competition within the U.S. controls industry to provide these services advances technology; and since technology is one of the four factors of production, i.e., labor, capital, resources and technology, overall productivity gets a boost and this generally increases the wealth of a nation. But the link is not direct. And of coarse everything gets tangled up when you factor in globalization. Like in the case of an American firm using foreign made hardware to provide a solution to a foreign or domestic manufacturing facility located overseas. How does such a transaction benefit the U.S. economy in the long run? Underlying all of this, is two decades worth of frustration with fed chairmen, treasury secretaries and economic advisers resigned to the migration of manufacturing overseas. In the 80's there was a resolve. And this resolve led to PLC's, robots and a rush of American students into engineering schools. We are racking up quite a bill for our grandchildren to repay. The agenda in Washington is vast and varied but not much is mentioned about manufacturing beyond wind turbines supplying power to electric vehicles. I'm not advocating bailouts or protectionism, I'm pretty sure free markets and 'creative destruction' are good things; but tax laws should be changed to incentivize domestic manufacturing, some of the many dollars being spent should be directed towards technical education and R&D geared to benefit American manufacturing. It should be easier for an engineering major to get a loan for their education than a politcal science major, and their interest rate should be lower as well. Really, I just wanted to know if there were any PLC's manufactured in the U.S.A. But now that the coarse has veered, I'd be very interested to hear what people think about the state of American manufacturing and the importance of the manufacturing sector to the overall economy. Edited by popquiz

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
BTW, there are Entertron and Ez Automation. My company, Delta Computer Systems, makes motion controllers. We have been slowly growing until this year. The state of the economy sucks. We are going to have the socialization or Obamination of the nation where the focus is concentrated on distributing wealth and not creating it. Washington state has a B&O, business and occupation, tax on businesses that is more like a flat tax on gross than than on profit. The rates change depending on whether the money came from manufacturing or a service. Gross income from service is taxed it over 2% whereas manufacturing is taxed at about 1.5% the last time I looked. I think this is a much better way to go than the standard business income tax. A business can do $10 M of business and show no profit and pay nothing. This is insane!!!! A business that consumes $10 M of resources and produce $10 M of resource is not efficient and should be taxed more heavily than and company that produces $5 M and consumes $4M and therefor shows a profit of $1 M. Bush is a fool. Obama is smarter but he is a socialist and therefor evil. I tend to be more libertarian. Both parties suck. They don't read the bills they are signing. I know I am smarter than those fools. I know I didn't vote for any of them. CAN YOU TELL I AM BITTER? Edited by Peter Nachtwey

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
I agree with Peter when he says that the PLC is just a piece of stuff unless someone knows how to make it go. Honestly putting any PLC into service in a factory in the US is more of a concern to me than where the PLC came from. It only takes one PLC to make a thousand or million pieces of product that is what popquiz calls wealth generating. Plus, you can't outsource controls engineering as well as you can traditional PC programming :)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
I personally prefer the term "value added" when looking at any process. If you take a raw material and turn it into an object of worth that is producing.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Both PRODUCE wealth. Wealth is created by labor, period. This has been argued ever since the popular Wealth of Nations very succinctly made the argument, and at this point the argument is decidedly over. Unless it is forced via taxation and/or other regulatory controls (price controls, etc.,), unfettered contracts involve a mutual exchange of wealth in which both parties are better off in the end. It is a win-win situation in which both parties walk away for the better. No matter how you slice it, wealth is always increasing and always a positive sum game. If you read their arguments, the arguments that the dumbkopfs are presenting that the service sector is "wealth consuming" would apply equally to those of "manufacturing". They only consider hard assets as "wealth". By that definition, only mining and perhaps agriculture is "wealth producing". Manufacturing simply purchases raw materials, mixes it with more labor, and then resells the product, resulting in a classic definition of a "service" business except that some material is passed along the way. There is an antiquated and decidedly totally disproven concept that wealth is a zero-sum game. The basic theory is that there is a fixed and finite amount of wealth in the world. This was the way that 18th and 19th century European economists saw the world. With this concept, then, every transaction or trade involves a "winner" and a "loser"...so you can simply measure the amount of money changing hands in terms of trade among countries. This allows one to measure who the "winners" and "losers" are. That's called the "trade deficit". It's an old 19th century concept and clearly bogus on the face of it. Under that concept, then, the only way to get ahead in the world is to simply TAKE the wealth of others by force. This was the moral justification for empire building that was so popular with European countries centuries ago. Under that model, "trade" is obviously a true win-lose scenario. I suggest if you want to see the U.S. more competitive, to start figuring out how to tear down and remove impediments to American businesses and competitiveness. Things like Sarbanes-Oxley, insane and nonsensical environmental regulations, ISO 9000, affirmative action (vs. equal opportunity), non-transparent banking and financial businesses, and almost the highest corporate taxation in the world (to say nothing of double taxation) put U.S. businesses at a decided disadvantage against competitors around the world. These are the things that are driving businesses overseas to lower regulatory environments which are becoming much more competitive as they begin to build the same intellectual and manufacturing bases that exist here.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Nice to know that the 1st Law of Thermodynamics has been disproved. For those that fell asleep in high school science "The First Law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed" . The coralaries of this are that Matter cannot be created or destroyed and by inference wealth cannot be created or destroyed just changed in form. In a finite world on a finite planet, how can the wealth of the planet be infinite? This doesn't lofically compute for me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Wealth does not correlate to energy. I work to "make money". My employer pays me for what I do. In turn, my employer takes what I did and sells a product to someone else, making a profit on the difference. In this little microcosm which could in fact be a service business, I make out to the better because I made money on the deal. My employer ALSO made money on the deal. The only input into the process is my labor, which clearly generated wealth. I can take that money and spend it on things as a consumer, or turn around and invest it, and make more money by loaning it out to someone else (even my employer) who in turn pays me for utilizing my money. In this case the labor is supplied by someone else but the end result is that again, the net effect is that the amount of wealth in the world was increased. In any transaction where free will reigns on both sides of the equation, the net result of any transaction is always a win-win scenario, even if the results are infinitesimally small. Otherwise, there would be no driving force whatsoever for either party to trade at all. The end result of human endeavors by the way is to DECREASE the amount of entropy in the world. We constantly strive to create order out of chaos, directly defying thermodynamic laws. Of course we only do this by DECREASING entropy in other areas (such as the process of combustion), but the part that we mostly get concerned with is the entropy-decreasing result. So by this definition it would seem that wealth does not equal energy. If anything, it might equate to a decrease of entropy, which is completely orthogonal to energy.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Wealth is not the amount of stuff which is finite but probably actually growing on the earth with meteorite impacts, but I digress. Which would be more valuable to you? A pile of metal, rubber, glass, hydrocarbon fluids or a new car using exactly the same materials? The value was created by taking a finite amount of stuff and transforming its organization into something you value more than the sum of the individual components. Note that the number of ways that stuff can be put together is essentially infinite. Very few of these ways are useful but even fewer consist of the ways we've tried already. Learned and inventive people will discover and develop even more of these useful and valuable methods of arranging the exact same stuff. The major input is energy from the sun. To a lesser extent is energy from the earth's core and the breakdown of high massed elements. As long as we have energy more complex and useful forms of stuff can be developed. Thus 'wealth' (the value of the stuff) can grow theoretically without limit (well, at least as long as we have the sun.) On another note - while the amount of the raw stuff is essentially unchanging, much of it is now in forms that we throw away as 'garbage'. I think the most valuable resource stores in the future will be our landfills.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Recently, my youngest caught a nasty bug that was going around, so I took him to the doctor’s office. His comprehensive battery of questions suggested a curiosity about pretty much everything in the examining room. My final answer was, “If you study really hard, you can become a doctor someday.” To which he immediately responded, to my extreme satisfaction, “No, I want to be an engineer; I want to build things.” From your posts, it appears that the general consensus is: The goal is to add value - which suggests that manufacturing is not essential. But my uneasy concern for the manufacturing sector was ratcheted up after this exchange with my son. Will there be anything for him to build? Anyway, I offer two links which consider the effects of the last recession on the manufacturing sector. The first article was written by the PhD that wrote my Inter. Macro Economics text. My directional school Professor descibed him as a “superstar.” But, when he wrote this article, he was in the Bush administration and was paid to put a positive spin on things. It was a great text book and a bestseller. I can’t vouch for the other link but it is definitely a counterpoint. http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/fac.../40_mfgtalk.pdf http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/briefingpapers_bp149/ I work for a manufacturing facility which was founded at the turn of the century by a blacksmith – we've got some cool toys, but our overall aproach, I suspect, is not state of the art. I don’t want to wait 4 years for the academics to study and explain the effects of the current recession on the manufacturing sector. I’d be very pleased to here from someone like a service rep, or a vendor who travels a lot, or someone who works in a state of the art facility. How is the manufacturing sector doing, over the long run? And can the U.S. pay its bills (thrive) without one? Edited by popquiz

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Not sure if it refers to our economy and this time in our history, but at a time in History when a Roman Denarius would buy 8 quarts of wheat or 24 quarts of barley; the Apostle John said to expect a denarius to buy 1 quart of wheat or 3 of barley. That means he expected money to lose 7/8ths of its buying power before the end of time. Not something great to look forward to.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
There will ALWAYS be a manufacturing sector. Just outside of San Francisco, there is actually a plant making ductile (cast) iron water pipe (Pacific States). If you've ever seen a pipe plant...let's just say that they are the epitomy of dirty, nasty smoke stack industries. This plant is not only surviving but thriving. They are the most profitable pipe plant in the U.S. What is happening to the manufacturing sector is quite obvious and explainable. Right now people are scared, and perhaps rightly so. So they pull back. Or they simply don't have any free income, or they are trying to survive while "unemployed". This means that the durable goods market is in a total shambles. Durable goods meaning essentially anything that you would normally use a loan to purchase. This means autos, furniture, appliances, and construction components like wood, cement, steel, shingles, siding, and asphalt. Needless to say similar problems apply to related and similar industries such as banking and real estate. The situation is even worse in some areas than others. Companies like GE, GM, and Chrysler felt that they could play the banking game just as good as or better than the bankers. So their financial business units have all but destroyed them in the process. Other industries such as pharmaceuticals, packaging, and food are largely either unscathed or thriving. The biggest impact to these businesses has been the roller coaster energy costs and other similar influences. I can't exactly say that these businesses have been doing necessarily "bad" or "good"...they've more or less just been moving sideways. As usual, there have been layoffs, and also more merger/acquisitions and/or spinoffs than I can possibly keep track of. Every old name seems to be new again, and new names seem to be dropping out left and right. This amount of turmoil has also trickled down into small businesses. This is the short term. Over the long term, has anyone noticed that where it used to be that the vast majority of consumer items came from Japan or Taiwan, that lately the labelling refers to one of the other Asian countries, or else China? The standard of living in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan is now such that it is roughly similar to the U.S. The idea of cheap labor abroad has effectively vanished in those countries since their standard of living is now more similar to that of other civilized Western countries. Over the next decade or so, the trend will probably continue throughout the remaining "third world" Asian countries. It has already hit the coastal areas of China and is beginning to move inland. As this happens, the difference between U.S. and foreign countries effectively becomes neutral as there is no longer a source of "cheap labor". Instead, the resulting highly educated population begins to compete with the U.S. as direct competitors. We have seen names like Zenith and Magnovox virtually disappear, being replaced with names like Sony and LG. This isn't a case of "moving manufacturing overseas". This is direct competition with foreign companies who have developed their own manufacturing to compete more or less on an equal footing. Make no mistake though they are just as multinational as we are. There is a Sony CD factory right in the mecca for socialism on the East coast, New Jersey, not too far from the corporate headquarters of another famous American brand name, Campbell's. Toyota also has plants in the U.S. And Kohler has either built or bought plants in other countries. The Kohler plant in China does NOT export, at least not outside Asia. The whole purpose of that plant was to go after the growing domestic market where there is a rising demand for indoor domestic plumbing in China as the standard of living continues to rise in that country. Herb Kohler has been extremely up front about the marketing plan with regards to that plant and has followed through with it. If anything, I could probably pick out a few choice examples of Japanese companies who have built plants in the U.S. and use them as case examples of how cheap U.S. resources (labor or otherwise) are sucking away manufacturing capacity from Japan and turning it into a "service economy". The reality is that for instance, U.S. farmers have increased their productivity over 1000% in the course of about a century. A century ago, over 80% of the U.S. population was employed in agriculture. Now that number is less than 2%. Is it because of urban sprawl consuming 95% of the available agricultural land and forcing agriculture abroad? Nope. The U.S. is still the largest exporter of food in the world. The reason is simply that one farmer can outproduce over 100 farmers from a century ago. In a similar way, manufacturing productivity has continued to become ever increasingly mechanized and modernized. It used to take somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people to run a typical integrated steel mill. Now fewer than 3,000 people can do what those numbers previously did, to say nothing of the increases in raw capacity within the same footprint. That being said, far more mechanics, electricians, engineers, consultants, programmers, and many other service personnel are simply necessary to keep a highly mechanized steel mill operating. Every time we "automate away" another production job, we are at this point probably adding another technician to the pay roll to maintain the equipment. As this trend continues (although at a slower pace...the big gains are pretty much done), we will probably continue to see more people flip from the manufacturing to service industries. Right now I work in one of the largest agrochemical companies in the world. I work around gargantuan equipment by any standard of measure. We have a bucket wheel excavator system that is over 7 miles long. One scoop from one of our drag line excavators is about the size of your average 2 car garage. The drag lines in this plant have been featured on one of the Discovery Channel shows talking about "monster machines". It requires a 2 man crew to "run" the machine when it's in operation. But we have probably close to 2 dozen people on staff to keep all 3 of them running. We also probably keep about that same number of contractors in business full time, never mind all the various ancilliary businesses which supply the transformers, cables (electrical and wire rope), welding rod, steel, oils, greases, and so forth that keep these bad boys running. I don't know about our own maintenance staff, but those dozens of service contractors are a "service industry". But if you count how many of us are directly involved in digging dirt, truly "manufacturing" anything at all, it's just the 6 operators on board the 3 machines. If we turn the clock back even 40 years ago or so, those crews would have swelled to dozens, but the production levels would have dropped from millions of tons a year down to perhaps a few hundred. So from a practical point of view, U.S. manufacturing in certain sectors is decidedly under stress to say the least! The oldest pipe plant in the U.S., the one that cast the first cast iron pipe in this country, just closed a couple months ago (and I was there on the very last day). To say that their industry is under stress is putting it mildly. Do I think though that the ductile iron pipe industry is going to move overseas? Hardly. The same employer actually pioneered the very first effort to import pipe from China. Not only did the project fail, but it failed spectacularly. It is unlikely that any other pipe company is going to try it again for years to come. But the ductile iron pipe business is hardly going away. In recent years until the current recession kicked in, the ductile iron pipe industry was actually growing. All pipe companies were having record breaking years. The only reason the Chinese import project was even attempted was simply because late in the construction season, there wasn't enough pipe being made anywhere in the country to meet demand. I predict that this recession is going to be like every other one in the past. Sure, some businesses will close. People will get shuffled around. Some will retire or change occupations. But the stress of a recession is good for a business. When times are good, people get complacent. There's little regard for getting very efficient or innovative. As business picks up again, those efficiency gains and creative ideas that helped the company weather the bad times will continue to improve the bottom line as business returns to normal levels. Some industries may see a paradigm shift. There are numerous paradigm shifts at play in the IT world. An example is the "Netbook" concept which seems to be fluorishing. This is a decided shift in paradigms away from moving towards ever faster, larger, and more expensive laptops and desktops. At the server level, virtualization in many different forms has taken off in a big way. Effectively, the mainframe and giant disk arrays has been reincarnated. We are back to a world of terminals (aka "thin clients") connected to servers as a computing model. SANs are beginning to make inroads into small and medium size companies. Cloud computing takes this concept an even bigger step beyond even corporate mainframes. And finally, the dominance of Microsoft in both operating systems and web browsers is certainly waning. I think we can look at farming as a predictor of what will happen to manufacturing. Farming has certainly not "gone away". Despite fears that agriculture would move to Mexico after NAFTA, it simply hasn't happened. Farming in terms of number of people and arable land has certainly shrunk. But it has hardly gone away. The U.S. produces more food than ever. I believe the same thing is happening to manufacturing. It will never go away. It will continue to face increasing foreign competition. We may even see "toll manufacturers". We already have contract shippers, contract packagers, contract electronic circuit board fabricators, even contract chip manufacturers and contract refineries. Neither Lattice Semiconductor (a popular FPGA manufacturer) nor ARM (famous CPU manufacturer) have any actual fabrication facilities of their own at all. I expect the same trend to pop up in other manufacturing businesses. Perhaps one day the "manufacturing cell" concept will become so generic that it won't be limited to just CNC/machine shops. Yes, the number of people who are directly involved in manufacturing will shrink. And the amount of foreign competition will continue to increase. As that happens, more and more people will be freed up to move further up the food chain, enhancing other parts of our lives. This of necessity means that the much maligned "service industry" will continue to grow, although perhaps not at the same pace as it has in the past.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!


Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.


Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  
Followers 0