r/manufacturing

You know the one. That thing that makes you want to flip the whiteboard every time it comes up.

• "We've always done it this way."
• Metrics reviewed in every meeting, nothing changes.
• A 5S drive that lasts exactly two weeks.
• Leadership spotted on the floor once a quarter, during the audit.

What's yours?

My story is very simple,

In my teenage years, I crafted a low quality radio antennae without any adult supervision in Western Kenya close to Uganda border. I was able to capture both Uganda and Tanzanian channels which played my favorite urban music. As a bonus, I was introduced to Bongo Rap Music: Great poetical talent back then. All this was before high school, which only taught theoretical physics. I call this experience backward-learning and here's why:

Our school systems have for long time been creating unemployment for many youths destroying national growth. I have witnessed disadvantaged kids try fix radios and solved minor engineering problems while sent home for fees to pay for absolutely nothing.

This is why I propose a way to solve the unemployment crisis in Africa with the help of both private and government industries. CBC and CBE in Kenya has already been overtaken by inexperienced trainers who are only after the money. Leaders in the Education ministry offer incompetence, talking about how it's hard to sustain disadvantaged schooling systems in remote settings and thus focus on developed schools in established settings establishing more error through marginalization; I was able to make that antennae in a remote setting.

What we need is experts in various manufacturing industries, to be awarded Teaching and Training Certificates in collaboration with Primary and secondary level teachers and to create Technical syllabuses. Their work is to integrate tangible engineering into the education system.

Expanded Workshops, both in Schools and The Manufacturing Companies is the way to go to stop politicians from building more classrooms to get votes from parents, what we need is hubs and labs the schools already have land. We have already wasted a lot of money serving incompetency but this new path should still be cheaper and more effective in terms of real skill-development.

We don't want confusion, we want kids to be able to choose from the grassroot level and develop real career skills instead of graduating and applying for office jobs. Graduates who never knew what talents were inbuilt in them all scrambling for office spaces.

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Like many , I’ve always thought about my own machine shop. My first job at 15 was cleaning chips out of Bridgeports and it’s just never left me. The last few years, I have been targeting going out on my own 8 years from now but really feeling like the time maybe much sooner than that.

In ~30 years I have had quite a few roles. I have great relationships with my team, strong relationships with customers and I think I know this business.

I believe I could fill every hour of every spindle I could buy.

Tell me what I don’t know or push me over the edge guys!

How can I find a small manufacturer to create an electrolyte mix for me (I know the formulation already). I just want a small batch produced first. who will produce a small batch? 500 servings or so

Sorry if this is not the right group. Im newer to reddit (I know, late to the game) and I guess I dont have enough karma for other subs

I have a product that I designed in Onshape that has roughly 50 parts(Most parts are off the shelf and about 11 that are to be injection molded(currently 3d printed). I am looking for someone to build out a Complete CAD package that I can send out to get bid for manufacturing/injection Molding and Assembly of the final product. I taught myself Onshape but now I need a professionally detailed drawing package. Where do I go to find this person?

Existing wearable product in production, molds have seen a few revs and are holding up well. We bought 1000kg of a Dupont product ages ago and are nearing the end of it. There's a sweet looking BASF product called Ellastolan 1180A that has an HPM 'high performance medical' variety that we're trying to source. Our injection CM is unable to source this material. Wondering what going in the front door at BASF looks like for smaller orders? Would welcome suggestions for plastics brokers in the Douguan/SZ area.

Last week I visited a contract manufacturer doing maybe 50-100 employees. Good shop, experienced people, clearly knew their stuff.

But their quality process? Fully manual. Operators wrote measurements on a paper log. A supervisor entered it into Excel at the end of the shift. The quality manager pulled that Excel to build a weekly report. And they were only finding out about process drift after the scrap had already been made.

When I showed them a live SPC control chart updating in real time as a gauge feeds data directly into the software, the quality manager literally went quiet for a second and said "we could have caught last month's issue with this."

They're currently in a trial. No pressure post — just thought it was a good reminder that a lot of shops are still operating this way and don't realize how much it's costing them.

Anyone else still seeing fully manual QC processes out there? What's the biggest pushback you get when trying to digitize?

I've been helping a few small manufacturing teams clean up their KPI tracking, and these 3 mistakes come up over and over.

1. Tracking too many KPIs

If everything is important, nothing is important. Start with 3-5 metrics that actually drive decisions.

2. Only reviewing KPIs monthly

Monthly reports hide problems. Weekly (or even daily) visibility shows bottlenecks before they become expensive.

3. No link between KPIs and action

A KPI is useless unless it changes behavior. If a metric doesn't trigger a decision, it's noise.

I've been building simple Excel dashboards for shops that want visibility without a full ERP. If anyone wants to see examples or how I structure them, I can share screenshots.

I have been through two ERP rollouts in manufacturing environments and both of them were painful in ways that felt completely avoidable in hindsight. I always assumed we just got unlucky with vendors or timing. Then I came across an article that broke down the actual reasons this keeps happening across the industry and it made a lot of things click.

The core problems it identifies:

1. Everyone compares feature lists. Every vendor checks every box on every RFP. The spreadsheet tells you nothing because the answer is always yes. What actually eliminates vendors are the hard technical requirements a system simply cannot meet, and nobody leads with those.
2. Most consultants running these evaluations are not independent. Referral arrangements between consultants and vendors are standard practice in this market. The recommendation follows the commission, not your requirements.
3. The demo is not real. Sales teams show you a clean environment with practiced click paths and ideal data. What you see in the demo has almost no relationship to what your actual production data does inside the system six months later.
4. Implementation costs 2 to 5 times the software subscription and almost nobody budgets for it upfront. Manufacturers keep getting blindsided by this.
5. The SAP ECC deadline is pushing manufacturers into rushed S/4HANA migrations without properly evaluating whether it is actually the right system for their operation. A migration off ECC is a full reimplementation. If you are reimplementing anyway, you should be looking at everything.

All of this matches exactly what I saw from the inside. The selection process is where these projects fail, not the go-live.

Curious whether engineers and ops people here recognise this pattern. Please say what sector and company size you are coming from before replying.

References: Full breakdown here.