RAPID

On June 25, RAPID's CEO Bill Grieco participated in an ASME Virtual Congressional Briefing on the topic "Managing and Rethinking the Supply Chain." 

The briefing featured speakers from the Manufacturing USA institutes, academia, and industry, including:

-    Bill Grieco, Chief Executive Officer, RAPID Manufacturing Institute

-    John Dyck, Chief Executive Officer, CESMII- the Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute

-    Gary Fedder, Howard M. Wilkoff Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

-    Jeff Kent, Vice President, Smart Platforms Technology & Innovation, Procter & Gamble

 

In the briefing, the panelists outlined strategies for improving U.S. manufacturing and strengthening supply chains.  Bill Grieco shared case studies for how RAPID’s work on modular manufacturing is transforming the process industries and enabling a more distributed production footprint.  Using smaller scale, modular process technologies will allow producers to commercialize new manufacturing platforms at lower capital and operating costs and manufacture products more sustainably closer to raw materials sources and/or product consumers.  John Dyck discussed a CESMII-led effort to develop a secure data exchange through which sellers and buyers along various value chains might safely exchange demand data, allowing suppliers to adjust manufacturing capacity to respond to consumer needs in real time.  Such a system would offer greater transparency and allow production to flexibly scale to meet changing demand across industry segments.  Gary Fedder described how educating and developing the future manufacturing workforce will support this transformation.  As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon and former interim CEO of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) institute, Fedder shared both the evolving academic and industry-centric perspectives on skills needed by the current workforce and how institute-led internships and on-the-job training plays a key role in growing the technical workforce of the future.  Finally, Jeff Kent provided an industry view on manufacturing and supply chain.  Kent offered details about a federally-funded university/industry project for which P&G is offering unique systems analysis tools to map the supply chains for critical medicines.

Click here to watch the full recording of the congressional briefing.