Regular Business Day readers are treated to an array of impressive opinion pieces on manufacturing, and the debate conducted in this and other business publications can be invaluable.
Does SA need its own steel industry? How will our vehicle sector cope with the transition to EVs? How do we promote our own manufacturing capacity for solar power components and other alternative energy hardware?
All these are vital questions, made more complicated by the international context of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, shifting global alliances, the move to free trade within Africa, and the breakneck advance of AI and other aspects of technological change.
Manufacturing is at the heart of our economy, and Your Life Is Manufactured provides a convincing case for it to remain so.
I have been unapologetic in my disdain for many books on business or management. Too often, they are too abstract, just badly written or brain-numbingly boring. Not this one.
Cambridge professor Tim Minshall not only knows his subject extraordinarily well, he is also a brilliant communicator, peppering his text with fascinating anecdotes, real-life examples, facts and figures.
This is no dull academic textbook. It looks at the real world and provides a compelling analysis of manufacturing and its potential to destroy — or help to save — the planet.
“We need to head off on a journey to seek the answers to two big questions. Why is our modern manufacturing world so fragile and so damaging to the planet? And what can be done to make it less fragile and damaging?” Minshall asks.
However, before he tackles the vital question of sustainability, he unpicks the intricacies of manufacturing, looking at processes, supply chains and a whole lot more.
“Unless you are currently floating naked through space, you are right now in immediate contact with multiple manufactured products. Throughout every day of your life, you will be wearing, consuming, being transported or sheltered by, communicating through or being restored to health by manufactured products. Yet the processes by which these items appear in our lives are, to most of us, largely invisible,” he suggests.
Because of this invisibility, he argues that manufacturing has become like the sewage system: essential for our lives, yet out of mind until things go wrong.
As well as looking at traditional factories, Minshall suggests that his manufacturing analysis can be applied to less obvious operations, such as hospitals and construction sites. He takes us through the different industrial revolutions, and it is fascinating to read that US car pioneer Henry Ford developed his ideas for conveyor belt manufacturing after observing the operation of a slaughterhouse.
We read: “Ford was intrigued by one particular feature of how the more advanced abattoirs operated. A powered conveyor brought each carcass to a worker who then performed a particular task — cutting and removing — before the line carried the now lighter carcass to the next worker. Having seen how efficient this process was, with each worker standing still and repeating the same activity as things passed by them, Ford applied it in reverse to the world of cars and, voilà, the assembly line was born. Soon, thanks to the productivity gains realised from the widespread adoption of the assembly line, huge volumes of standardised products could be made.”
The global pandemic of the early 2020s revealed how extraordinarily delicate the system is that connects all the companies and people that make, distribute and sell us consumer staples such as food and toiletries.
Your Life is Manufactured is particularly helpful in discussing the most dramatic rupture in manufacturing to have occurred in recent years — the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on global supply chains.
“The global pandemic of the early 2020s revealed how extraordinarily delicate the system is that connects all the companies and people that make, distribute and sell us consumer staples such as food and toiletries. When it works well, we take it for granted; when it judders or grinds to a halt, we are jolted to disbelief and outrage,” Minshall observes.
He notes that the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the risks of relying on a small number of very large factories, often in faraway countries, to make essential goods such as vaccines and personal protective equipment. One lesson we have learnt from the pandemic is that “there is wider recognition of the importance of having appropriately skilled people and suitable factories locally to provide healthcare supplies. This can ensure resilient sources of medicines and equipment, more local employment and fewer transportation emissions”.
Being forced by the paralysis of global trade due to Covid-19 to make things locally also triggered innovation, such as the conversion of production processes in some SA chemicals factories to make hand sanitiser, and the highly successful project to produce ventilators for hospitals locally.
The concluding chapters of the book look at sustainability.
Just a few examples illustrate the impact that manufacturing can have. It is disturbing to discover that “our global food manufacturing system currently produces enough to feed every one of the 8-billion people in the world. In fact, we produce enough to feed 10-billion people. Yet one in nine people is undernourished because, in part, our manufacturing system wastes so much of the food it produces, and it never reaches the mouths of those who need it the most”.
Meanwhile, the textiles and clothing sector has some deeply damaging processes. Minshall notes that the UN estimates about 7,500l of water are used in the complete process — from field to sale — of making a single pair of jeans. That’s the amount of water that the average person drinks in seven years.
Tackling the problem
However, while manufacturing has been responsible for much damage to the planet, it may also provide ways of tackling the problem. “This is exactly what is happening now with the manufacturing of cars as we switch from internal combustion engines (ICE) to electric vehicles (EVs). This is manufacturing innovation on a planetary scale.
The technology to propel an EV is almost laughably simple. All that mechanicalness is replaced by a battery pack (the biggest and heaviest component), at least one electric motor and some control devices to convert the battery’s DC current to the AC required by the motors and to manage the use of the batteries. That’s pretty much it,” Minshall writes.
It was also invaluable to read the benefits that refurbishing a building can bring, when compared to the environmental costs of demolishing an existing structure, and then starting over, building from scratch.
While this book is written from a British perspective, the analysis and conclusions are applicable for SA.
Minshall concludes: “Despite the scale, uncertainty and complexity of the challenges our planet and our communities face today, there is one thing of which I am now more than ever convinced: it is manufacturing that will deliver a more sustainable, more resilient and more equitable future for us all.”
I cannot recommend this superbly written and eye-opening book highly enough.
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