And Allied Signal Corp chairman Lawrence Bossidy has initiated the UK manufacturing versus services debate in the US, suggesting that for those that believe that IBM Corp should be making more, cheaper rather than shuttering factories all over the place, he might have been the right man for the job: US industry cannot slash its way to prosperity, he told the new Design & Manufacturing Institute of the Stevens Institute of Technology – adding that while design innovation is a US strength, we need to extend US technological excellence from the design laboratory to the manufacturing floor – American business needs to find ways to improve the speed with which we convert innovative design into high-quality, marketable product; many of our factory floors are populated by high-school graduates or dropouts, with a few engineers serving as supervisors safely ensconced behind glass walls, Bossidy said, where Japanese shop floors are staffed much more by graduate engineers who work directly with well-trained workers, to solve problems and improve manufacturing efficiency.
