Your Life Is Manufactured

REBECCA AHRENS

Some say it was a great Egyptian sandstorm with gusts up to 74 kilometers per hour that caused one of the largest container ships in the world, the Ever Given, to become wedged in the Suez Canal. Some say it was a small miscalculation in steering. Whatever the cause, On March 23^rd, 2021, an estimated $775 million worth of cargo became stuck in the narrow passage that connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas, completely blocking traffic for six days, and holding up an estimated 12% of global trade, each day. 

Supply chains were already stretched thin after the pandemic. Worker shortages, factory and border closures, bottlenecks at ports, and rapidly increasing demand for certain kinds of products had led to major product shortages and delays. Pundits and politicians began questioning how we'd ended up in such a precarious position.  

TIM MINSHALL

I think there's a whole issue around demanding low-cost, high-variety, speed of delivery. Manufacturers have responded to that saying, “Okay, we can do that.” But to get that to work, you've got to remove all redundancy and build a system that is remarkably fragile.

*INTRO*

REBECCA AHRENS

All right. Joe Renshaw, welcome to your very first episode as co-host. 

JOE RENSHAW

Thank you. It’s brilliant to be here. 

REBECCA AHRENS

How are you feeling? Are you excited? Are you nervous? 

JOE RENSHAW

I'm a little nervous, yeah, I'm a little nervous, but I'm mainly excited. 

REBECCA AHRENS

You're gonna be great. Alright, well, let's jump right into it then. So you and I recently had a conversation with Tim Minshall. About his book, Your Life Is Manufactured. 

TIM MINSHALL

I'm Tim Minshall. I'm head of the Institute for manufacturing at the University of Cambridge in the UK. I actually have two jobs. One is head of this institute, which is a part of the engineering department. We have around 350 people, and we do a bunch of education, research and knowledge transfer activities, but I have a second job, which is as a professor of innovation. 

So the Institute for manufacturing has been, in various forms, running since the 1960s and it's had one simple aim that we've focused upon for the last couple of decades, and that is to help manufacture a better world. And we do that with three areas of activity. We have some educational programs, we have 23 research labs, and we have a wholly owned subsidiary company focused on knowledge transfer. 

JOE RENSHAW

You have your Institute for Manufacturing. You have your career in academia. Now you've written this book, which I don't think is for the academic world. So what prompted you to write this book, and who have you written it for? 

TIM MINSHALL

So the idea of writing a book came about during COVID. We saw the message about manufacturing was suddenly jumping up. We heard a lot of commentators and journalists and government ministers talking about manufacturing with much more interest as things stopped being delivered to the shops. We said, Oh, great. So clearly, we recognize the importance of manufacturing.

But what was a bit worrying was some of the rather naive comments that were being made. These things can't be imported from overseas anymore. No worries. We can just manufacture them locally. We'll just start manufacturing. Then when it was pointed out that we couldn't manufacture many of these things, I was just so surprised at the backlash. People saying, Well, why not? Well, because we've let the manufacturing drift overseas over the years for good economic reasons. So I thought, wow, if we're not really understanding what manufacturing means broadly, shouldn't I try and write it down? So the book, in a way, is kind of our undergraduate program written up in a format that I hope makes it reasonably engaging and to tell the stories of how manufacturing is now, and how we see it changing in the future—and how it needs to change.

REBECCA AHRENS

There was this moment after the pandemic hit and particularly. I think the first wave of this was probably with the great toilet paper crisis of 2020, where all of a sudden people were saying like, “Well, wait a second, how is it possible that we could run out of toilet paper, you know?”

JOE RENSHAW

Did you run out of toilet paper in the states as well? 

REBECCA AHRENS

Yeah, we had toilet paper shortages, but we also had like cleaning supplies, masks, that kind of stuff was in short supply as well. People are sort of like flabbergasted that this could happen. And then there was a lot of conversation of like, “OK, well, why can't we just quickly start making XYZ product here, you know? “

There was just a deep misunderstanding about how complicated and difficult it really is to pivot and if you're used to making a certain kind of thing in your factory, pivot to making a different kind of thing. Or if a country is used to importing such and such a good from you know some other place to then pivot and start making that thing in in your own country like it's not a trivial transition to make.  

TIM MINSHALL

There’s almost an entire chapter devoted to toilet paper. And the reason is, it is a such a basic staple product, it is actually a very complex manufactured product, and once you start to literally pick it apart and look at it, really look at it, because it's the design of it is remarkably intricate. There are a lot of interesting design features, such as, you know, making sure that each sheet is serrated and it tears in exactly the right amount of force, and all the other properties that it's got.

But if you just stop looking at the product and look at, well, how did it get there? I remember when I thought, I need an example to start the book off that's accessible and simple. I thought, yeah, okay, toilet paper, great. And I thought, I don't actually—it's a bit embarrassing for the head of the Institute for manufacturing at the University of Cambridge to confess this—but I didn't know how it was made. I knew that some trees were involved, and a rolling mill… Between those two points, bit hazy.

So I thought, well, let's get a hold of people, talk to people who can explain to me what goes on. And it's remarkable, I mean, that extraordinary journey of the outputs of forests from different continents. Why would we grow trees in different parts of the world and then transfer and then do all sorts of clever things with them, and then transport them to somewhere else. We then do some more processing, which then leads to some more processing, which then goes through a complex supply chain.

So just with a quick example, apparently different trees grown in different climates have different properties. And you go, Okay, so those two properties of softness and strength are required. So forests are grown, and it takes decades, minimum, 40 years, to grow a forest that you can shop down and do something useful with, possibly longer. So then got forests, from a UK perspective, it'll be South America and Scandinavia, as well as parts of mainland Europe and the UK. Wait for 40 years, chop all those trees down, get all the bits of wood you need to build houses and do other good things. The smaller bits are then pulp chipped up into the bits of wood, which are then pulp up another chemical and mechanical and heat processing to extract what you need from it. You then have it in liquid form, a sort of gloopy mess. You then take the water out, with massive input of energy to dry it all out. You then ship it somewhere else, where you add the water back in again, and you then spray it onto these giant rolls, and those then go through a complex process. There's more heating and more processing, and then you've got these 1000s of rolls of toilet paper sitting in a warehouse.

Then there's an entire complex logistics process of getting it to us, which also is part of it. So something as simple as sheets of soft paper have an incredibly complex manufacturing journey. There's a whole “making” bit, there's a whole “moving” bit, and there's a whole consumer end to it—how do we actually get it to customers as well?

And I thought, wow, if it's that complicated for something that simple, what on earth must it be like for a car or an airliner or a smartphone? And so that it just, I thought, by giving it a really simple example first, that would help explain and indicate that actually it's the same process, but just magnified by orders of magnitude of complexity for other products. So that's one of my favorites. 

REBECCA AHRENS

The basic way that the book is structured, in my view, is that you spend the first part of the book kind of exploring how things are roughly set up right now. The middle portion of the book is really this deep dive into history. It's kind of like, “ OK, now that we have a basic understanding of the different types of factories and how supply networks work. Why it is that for example an iPhone, the phone itself and the various components, I think he got this statistic from another book called Door to Door, has to travel 250,000 kilometers, which equates to roughly six times around the entire world, for an iPhone to get from, you know, a manufacturer to you. 

TIM MINSHALL

It's about this, the journey of of a smartphone, and I just go, what? Because they're saying, Well, this thing, this particular component, or raw material, is in one place, so that's then moved somewhere else to be processed, which is then moved somewhere else to have some more processing done. And the complexity of the manufacturing processes that are needed to make just the micro processor, let alone all the other components to make a modern phone work—staggeringly complicated. So you end up moving things backwards and forwards, across borders to have something done, then sent back again and have some other thing done and sent off again. 

REBECCA AHRENS

And you know those six times around the world that the phone and its various components are traveling, like the majority of the time it's on a ship or the materials or the components are on a ship being shipped from place to place, burning bunker fuel. You know which is, as we know not the most sustainable choice. But that's you know how our system is set up right now. And so in the middle part of the book, he kind of goes into the history of like, okay, now we understand what's going on, how did we get here? Right? And that's where we get into the various industrial revolutions and the focus on reducing waste and increasing efficiency, and the rise of just in time manufacturing and lean manufacturing. So we've created the system that is geared toward reducing waste, which is, you know, defined in this very particular way—it's not just waste in the sense of stuff that goes in the trash. It's also waste in the sense of labor or resources that have gone into creating something that nobody actually wants. 

JOE RENSHAW

Well, and time as well, right? 

REBECCA AHRENS
And time, yes.

Within the book, you track this psychological evolution within the manufacturing industry, from something like just in time manufacturing, trying to eliminate waste and increasing efficiency. So that was sort of where we were, maybe, I don't know, 50, 30 years ago. To a focus on resiliency. And I think a lot of that shift came in the wake of the pandemic, where people—consumers, but also manufacturers—started realizing, like, oh, the way that we've created this hyper-efficient system has also left us very vulnerable, and the system is a little bit fragile. 

And so the focus has started to shift to this concept of resiliency, but not just on the part of the manufacturers themselves, right? They have an interest in resiliency in the sense that they want to be prepared and adaptable for a changing condition—like a changing demand condition, a changing market condition, a changing availability of their inputs—but also resiliency in the sense of nature, sustainability. A lot of the systems that we have in place are not sustainable for the long term, in terms of humans existing happily on the earth. And technology, I think you show, plays a big part in helping us achieve both those types of resiliency. So can you talk a little bit about that? Both the resiliency in terms of, like, “can I stay afloat as a as an enterprise?” and “can we shift things to be more harmonious with the natural world, less damaging to the environment?”

TIM MINSHALL

Absolutely, there's two really fundamental points about where manufacturing is now and where it needs to head to. So on that first one about resilience to ensure, as you say, survivability of the of the enterprise: It's been, as you say, incredible to see how the pandemic revealed the fragility of this system. I'm a terrible person. I really love my phone, and I love the Amazon app, and I can just go, click, and then a thing arrives the next day, and if it doesn't arrive the next day, I go, “well, that's disappointing, what went wrong there?” without thinking for a second about what had to happen to happen to get that product to turn up at my door at that time.

And so when that container ship, the 200,000 ton ever given, managed to get itself wedged across the Suez Canal, instantly stopping global trade, I'm just looking at that and sort of winding back from it going, wait a minute—so we've got fantastically complex manufacturing networks, which are beautifully optimized. And as you say, Rebecca, we've focused on eliminating waste that there's no redundancy. It's all going to operate at high speed. Shortest routes get it there quickly, because the customer won't accept anything less than when they ordered it, ideally, a bit faster. Everything is about that. And so a system that's been designed for that that can be completely messed up by one person on one ship making one small hand movement to adjust the speed and the rudder in slightly incorrectly stops the system dead in the water. Literally, you go, what? How is that possible?  

But I guess the other bit around the sustainability side to it. I mean, it is extraordinary how much moving around of stuff we do. If we forget the idea that, you know, is it good or bad to have things made elsewhere then brought to a place, we just forget that argument for a second, and just go, why are we moving things around all the time? It's not just things are made far away because a particular set of skills are available, or at a certain wage level or wages are just lower there, or there's something is advantageous that means you make it in one country because it's been more beneficial, and sell it somewhere else…If you take that away and say, Well, you're actually just moving bits around multiple times. It's incredible, and it's a thing of enormous beauty: this intricate, byzantine network of activities that allow us to have something like a mobile phone.

But we've kind of forgotten, at times, the cost to the natural world of doing that. We as customers are delighted we get an absolutely awe inspiring product. I mean, it is, I mean, objectively, it's an incredible piece of technology, a smartphone. But we're not aware of the cost to the natural environment—some of the social costs are becoming clearer now, we're more aware of those—but economically, we just go, well, but I still want it. I still want my product, So it's exactly as you say. It's a wonderful irony in a way. We’ve designed the system to remove waste, to make it super-efficient, actually, we've created a system which is very wasteful.

REBECCA AHRENS

I think one of the really interesting and important points in the book is that supply chain is a little bit of a misnomer. Really, a network is a better description. 

TIM MINSHALL

So the language of supply chain is actually, I think, very misleading, because it implies there's literally a point on one side and there's a chain of activities that lead to another point. I've got another colleague I went to see, Alexandra Brintrup, who's doing great work applying AI to supply networks. And you know, it's absolutely clear that “networks” much, much better describes what's going on in logistics. It's not a single line. It's a whole series of activities. In fact, she showed me to break me into this topic gently, she showed me some of the graphics she's produced that summarize a major automotive firm or one of the big aircraft production companies. And it's like one of those magic eye pictures—just covered in dots. And every dot represents some organization doing something, and every line between them represents some sort of transaction taking place.

Once you get up to any product that's an assembly of hundreds 1000s, 10s of 1000s, millions of components, the complexity of the supply network seems to increase exponentially. And then the risk associated with it increases exponentially, because very quickly you lose sight of what's going on right down at the bottom of it, and also you lose sight of, or maybe not even be aware of, the inter dependencies between all those nodes, all those activities within a supply network. 

REBECCA AHRENS

So the basic idea is that this group is attempting to kind of map those networks and then use AI to understand how the various nodes in the network are connected and what an impact might be of a particular event, whether it's, you know, the Ever Given getting lodged in the Suez Canal, or the fuel supply chain being disrupted in Europe because of the geopolitical situation in Ukraine and Russia. Those are the kind of problems that I think AI is well positioned to tackle. There are too many components for our basic algorithms to deal with, and too many subtle patterns that might be present in the data that only something like an AI could uncover.

And then the last part of the book, in my view, is what can be done about this? Like, it's, it seems clear, he lays out the argument that there's a reason that the system. Is set up the way it is, but we can also acknowledge that it's not working and something needs to change. And so the latter part of the book is focused on what can be done, and that's where technology starts to come in even more. You know, we're starting to talk about AI and the digitalization journey of various companies, and what that might mean and how it's important. Especially for smaller manufacturers, and he mentioned this in our conversation, like, there's a sense of like, oh, you know, other companies are going through this as well. Other companies are struggling with you know: What is digital transformation? What does it mean for me? How is it going to change my business? How do I stay resilient? You know, stay afloat in a new world where everything is very fragile, and I can see that the companies that have a lot of data are pulling ahead?

JOE RENSHAW

Could you tell us a bit about the omni factory? 

TIM MINSHALL

Sure. Well, it fits into a category of thing, a factory, that could be called a demonstrator. So they're not making products. They're not it's not part of anybody's production system, but it's demonstrating a concept.

As a quick aside, I do find it rather alarming though they've decided to call it the omni factory, because every time I think of that, all I can think of is that Pixar movie, The Incredibles and the Omni Droid, which sort of loses control and starts wiping people out. And I'd always mean to ask the team at Nottingham University whether their marketing team had watched that film before they named the Omni factory as it was,.

So anyway, the omni factory is a lovely example of saying, “Here's a concept that illustrates where manufacturing could be in the future. So part of it is creating a digital model of a manufacturing system. So that's been known for years. We can do simulations of manufacturing processes. That's not That's not new.

 So we move from digital from simulation, which is kind of static, to a digital twin, which is a representative with some sort of very low latency data put into it. So it's very, very much matching the real world. It's constantly updated. But a lot of what we've seen with digital twins, where it's been successful, has been around a single product, albeit a rather complex one. So one great example is GE and Rolls Royce, with their digital twins of gas turbines, where you can say, right, we want to know, if we fiddle with some bits on this, what will be the effect on its performance? If you've got a digital twin of an entity of a product, like a gas turbine, you can do amazing things with that.

But what if you want the digital twin to be of the system or the factory, the way of making the thing? That's what the omni factory is trying to do. And so they've really nailed the showbiz element of manufacturing demonstration.

So Svetan Ratchev, who runs it, has done an amazing job. So you walk into this control room where there are a series of big screens, and it is, you're observing a digital twin of a factory. And they can manipulate things, and they can say, we can see it doing this way. And bits of the floor can move to get different bits of equipment in the right place at the right time, and say, right now we can do this thing. We can build this wing spar or assemble this other big component system. And what's then very dramatic is they have one of those wonderful automatically opaque-to-transparent windows. You set it all up, and you press a button, and there you'll get to see the real factory reconfiguring itself to make that thing. So it's a sort of bringing together the idea of a digital twin for a manufacturing system, with the manufacturing system in very close physical proximity, but also this ability to rapidly change things. 

JOE RENSHAW

Yeah, and the to be clear, the the omnifactory is not a metaverse thing. It’s not virtual, it’s real.

REBECCA AHRENS

No, right, it's real. 

TIM MINSHALL

One of the issues with this is that these are big, complex systems, and so this is also backed by the UK Government, because these systems are not cheap. So there's this gap that these demonstrated facilities are trying to bridge, which is at the scale of what's going on in the omni factory, that might be quite difficult for very large firms, but they could probably do it if they wanted to. As we move down towards what it means for smaller firms, things get a little more complicated. And maybe this is something we can come back to later, because this issue of most manufacturing firms, as we know, the vast majority by number, are small manufacturing firms, and that’s a world of difference between Boeing and Airbus, and Jaguar Land Rover and GM, and all these great companies, with hundreds of thousands of employees—what do you do when there’s only 10 of you? How do you work in an environment where you don’t have access—you can still access the omnifactory—but what does something like that mean for you? And to give credit to the omni factory team, they are looking at ways in which elements of this can be made suitable for smaller manufacturing firms as well. 

JOE RENSHAW

Well, let's continue on this topic the digital divide in manufacturing and the issue of bigger companies who have the resources and the infrastructure to invest a lot of money and time into building digital systems that will, you know, have huge pay off on their productions, and then smaller companies who, as you say, might be single digit employees, who, frankly, don't have the time and don't have the personnel, and often actually don't necessarily have a clear business case to go fully digital.

TIM MINSHALL

Absolutely, it's a great point. No small firm is really in isolation. They're almost invariably part of someone else's supply network. But for the individual small firms, yeah, I mean, one of the issues is how in order to do digitalization, you've got to have your data in digital form.  There's something very interesting about maturity levels for digital adoption, and this is something that governments are very interested in.  

We've got a colleague, Duncan MacFarlane, who became really interested in low cost industrial digitalization that would be suitable for small manufacturing firms, because sometimes the bigger systems are just too much for a small company to absorb. They're just not ready for it yet. And even when small firm solutions are available. It there's got to be a great fit made there. So what he looked at is, what's the entry level technologies, what's the most basic thing you can do? And so he and his team did a great job, again, with colleagues from Nottingham and other universities around the UK, with government support, and said, Well, what are the most common problems that small manufacturing firms face. And so he did a load of workshops with companies to say that forget, forget the word digital. Just what are the problems you're facing, and it will be things like equipment monitoring or job tracking. There's literally in our factory, where is a particular customer's product, where is it, and for machine maintenance, it's, well, we've got to have someone who has to keep climbing that ladder and looking at that thing to make sure that widget is doing what it's supposed to do.

So Duncan and his colleagues went away and said, Well, if we just get some commercial off-the-shelf technologies, sort of GoPro cameras and Arduino controllers or Raspberry PI controllers and some and basic software, we can just build solutions for this that cost, like, you know, a couple of hundreds of dollars. And if they could be used, that's not going to replace the systems provided by the larger vendors, but it gives a great way of just getting you over the line and going, Ah, okay, I can see how this could help me. And so these low cost solutions, this project that's called Digital Manufacturing On a Shoe String is a way of supporting manufacturing firms to just move along the early stages of their industrial digitalization journey. And that's been really interesting to see how that works. 

JOE RENSHAW

I suppose we should perhaps tackle a thorny issue, which is increasing talk about bringing manufacturing back, and you seem to have, well, I think, quite a nuanced and sophisticated take on this. But before I put the question to you, I'd just like to pull out a stat or an anecdote from the book that really stood out to me, which is that of the highest per capita manufacturing output in the world, the two top countries are Switzerland and Singapore, so two very small countries that are in no way self-sufficient but have very high manufacturing output. On the other hand, you have much bigger countries like the US and China, where that talk around becoming self-sufficient seems to have some kind of political momentum around it. So without coming down on any particular side, what's your what's your take on this, this conversation.

TIM MINSHALL

It's a it is a complex one, and thank you for not forcing me to take sides in this one, because it is very nuanced. I think it's an interesting issue about what is necessary for a strong and resilient and equitable economy. How much manufacturing do you need? And critically, what should you be manufacturing? It can't just be well, just make stuff. There's this issue of comparative advantage between nations. It is an interesting debate we're having at the moment about the role of the semiconductor industry in the UK compared to what's happening in China, mainland China, and in Taiwan, and happening in the U.S., and happening in mainland Europe. There's a lot of interest, huge amounts of money going into the production of semiconductors. Well, should every nation attempt to make semiconductors? Well, that doesn't seem to make sense. In some nations, you can go, absolutely no. They have no history in this, no capabilities in this. And you have these ones over here, you can go, yes, yes, yes, absolutely, it makes sense for them to do it, like the US, but the whole bunch of countries in the middle where you go, really, should we, should we do that? Shouldn't we do that? Is it necessary?

And this links back to something you said, Rebecca, about the pandemic. The ability to manufacture vaccines was critical, the ability to manufacture specialist equipment for intensive care units, like ventilators, that became necessary. So how much of that capability do you need to keep going? Should you have, to your point Joe, should we have some sort of dormant factories that we spin up when we need them? Well, that that is possible, and some countries do that, particularly for defense related requirements. But that's not quite the same. Or do you say no, no, no, no, we're going to Support Formula One companies and aerospace a UK example. We're good at making racing cars and airplanes and jet engines and pharmaceuticals and few other bits and bobs. Well, can we just make sure that when something goes wrong those companies are doing the way they do their manufacturing means they can manufacture other things we might need as well. 

The lovely example I like to use in presentations is I've got a picture of an engineer building a high precision Intensive Care Unit patient ventilator, and he's doing it, and he's got a Microsoft HoloLens headset on, and he's been instructed what to do. And if you look at his polo shirt, it's got the company logo on it. He doesn't work for a medical device company. He works for Airbus. So an aircraft technician, thanks to all of these digital technologies that have been brought in to support Airbus and the things they were doing, they could deploy them to say, we can actually get our workers doing something different. Now, there's a lovely example of how having access to those digital platform digital technologies meant that when they needed to do a different thing, they could do that. 

It's doing these things and demonstrating that they are good and ironing out some of the bugs and showing people what can be done. But how, how do you scale that up? How do you deal with this scale up of solutions? And that's something, it's a really interesting engineering problem, because it's not a technical scale up. We can make one. Can we make 100 can we make 1000 can we make 100,000 can we make 1,000,000? It's how do we reconfigure these complex, techno-social systems that are manufacturing firms at scale to be able to do a new thing, to be more productive, to be more sustainable, to be more resilient, so that they can be more competitive. That, to me, is just a really interesting and important intellectual problem.

REBECCA AHRENS

It seems to me that there are bits of the book that are much more targeted at either people working in policy and or people working within manufacturing, because there are certain changes that need to happen that are not really in the hands of the of the general population. These are really, you know, changes that have to come from the executive level or the management level of particular factories. Do you see it as kind of having that dual audience? 

TIM MINSHALL

I think there is a simplifying of the message, making the message more accessible. So those who do understand manufacturing can say, Oh, here's a book that explains what I as a factory manager, as someone involved in supply chain, can give to other people and say, this is this is what I do. This is why it's important. They've explained to me what's going on and allowed us to go and visit and bring our students along. We've been very much trying to absorb what they do and package it in a way that makes it accessible to others. Because if we don't get that simple, very clear message out that manufacturing matters, that a balanced, every economy in the world, with probably one or two exceptions, needs to have the ability to make things, and it has to be explained in a way, I feel that isn't just evangelical manufacturing fetishism—there's a sort of a nobility in making things. There is that discussion. I'm very happy to have that one, but it's more fundamental than that. We need stuff. Stuff needs to be made, and we're doing it in a way at the moment that is very harmful to the planet. And so if we understand how we make it now and make it a bit more visible, we can then appreciate some of the negative sides of it and focus on how we can amplify the positive sides of it, reduce the bad things and improve the good things. 

REBECCA AHRENS

That’s our show for today.  

JOE RENSHAW

Tim’s book Your Life is Manufactured is out now in the UK. The US version, which I’ll note will be called How Things are Made, will be available in May.  

REBECCA AHRENS

You can find out more about Professor Tim Minshall’s work on the Institute for Manufacturing’s website. And you can follow him on LinkedIn

JOE RENSHAW

And you can find us on all podcast platforms, plus YouTube.  

REBECCA AHRENS

If you like the show, please rate and review us. It helps get the word out.  

JOE RENSHAW

You can also find us on Our Industrial Life.com. Every two weeks we publish a new batch of stories. Our latest batch includes pieces about solar paint and better ways to do plastic recycling.  

REBECCA AHRENS

We’re also on Substack and LinkedIn and you can email us at our.industrial.life@aveva.com. We’ll see you next time!