Made in America

FIRST General Forum
#41

Oh why not, I’ll chime in here. Should be fun.

First, Cory’s statement here:

It’s kind of disingenuous to say that China makes better stuff than America. China is obviously good at certain things and not so good at others. I fail to see any instance in which China could produce something that could not be made to the same or better quality standards as in the US. You will pay more for it, but the US (on the whole) is better at quality control and process development.

While Cory may be correct on the whole, in my experience, during the development of VEXpro we manufactured prototypes in both the US and China. We did extensive sourcing exercises to find US based suppliers for as many components as possible. In every product (note I said every product), the US suppliers could not meet my quality requirements and could not meet my delivery requirements. The FRC community would not have the quality of VEXpro gears or the VersaPlanetary gearboxes if we held ourselves to the “must be made in the USA” mantra.

Also, there is no way VEX would have been able to create the 300 VEXpro parts that teams are now using if we were required to use US manufacturing.

Now, with respect to the whole jobs argument, I can share one of three stories I have regarding the jobs debate.

In 1998, IFI started with two men working out of their garage. Now IFI has over 200 employees worldwide with about 160 of them working here in Greenville, TX. If they decided to use US manufacturing for the toy and VEX divisions, then they would not be the size company they are today. That is a fact. IFI literally has created 160 US jobs by actually out sourcing manufacturing processes that make sense.

Yep, we make a lot of our VEX and VEXpro products in China. We also design, engineer, program, test, and kit all of those products here in Texas. If you don’t purchase our products because they are not “Made in the USA” (BTW, there are very strict US rules that allow you to use that sentence on a product) , then it is your loss.

Paul

#42

Who cares really about being “Made in America?”

All I care about is where I’m buying from and the reputation they have.
I’d bet that 99% of what teams decide to buy have nothing to do with the fine print on where they are made?:rolleyes:

#43

Yes, the quality of some things from China is appalling. But some of it is the best available on the planet. And exactly the same can be said about the United States.

The point is, any country can produce junk, just as any country can produce excellence. The issue is the price you are willing to pay.

We live in a global economy, buy from the supplier who meets your needs. Pure capitalism dictates that if someone eets your needs better, they get your business. And vice-versa.

#44

Make your decisions based on the function, quality, cost, and availability of the product. Raw material might be from Canada, design from the US, mold base from Japan and production from China.

SolidWorks is sold in 80 countries. Designers and manufacturers are everywhere. SolidWorks is headquartered in the US but our parent, Dassault Systemes is headquartered in France.

My engineering colleagues that I directly communicate with are in Asia, Europe Africa, Austrailia and the Americas. I use a cell phone designed in the US and manufactured in China. My Lenovo computer was manufactured in the US. I own a jeep that works great in the snow.

This is the global world we design, manufacture, and consume in. Marie

#45

At my work, we love to deal with France because their tolerances are within 2mm and you can’t beat their quality or customer service! The only issue we had was with shipping out of the port of France and the 2 week lead time. There are a lot of pirates around the surrounding area so you have to make sure that your shipments are insured for triple the amount they cost. All in all I would recommend France over any US supplier.

#46

What do you mean by “technology”?

Many participants on this forum would agree that our friends from Clear lake (118) design some of the most amazing and inspiring robots. They did not “outsource” that design work. I don’t think 254’s 6 second climber was outsource either.

If you are talking about parts, you will have to find a new control system. National Instruments manufactures a lot of their products in Hungary. One of the other posters has already pointed out the Solidworks is based in France. It is a fair bet that most of the chips (IC’s) used in the the various electronic modules, motor controllers etc. have foreign content even if the chip is branded with a US-based manufacturer. FIRST would no longer be able to continue with FIRST LEGO League since LEGO is based in Denmark. In my day job, there are instances where there are no US-based manufacturers of suitable parts.

What about your students, mentors and the teachers/professors at the universities your FRC alumni aspire to attend? Do they have to be “made in America” to participate in FIRST?

#47

^^^^

+10

Thanks to Philso and everyone else who has pointed out the flaws in the premise that started this thread.

#48

For the most part, when we purchase imported Common Off The Shelf components (also known as COTS), most of the profit from COTS is made by the foreign manufacturer. A large degree of imported COTS on our robots also means a large amount of money and technology jobs are flowing out of America.

In my opinion, this is the problem that needs solving.

We are trying to inspire future engineers, engineers we hope will have jobs when they graduate. Is imported COTS this best long term use of our money? Is teaching future engineers to rely upon imported COTS the best long term strategy?

#49

Is imported COTS this best long term use of our money?

This is a question that should have been asked by the previous generation 20 years ago.

The only way to bring this production back to this side of the pond is to automate the h3!! out of our manufacturing industries to remove labor costs. Otherwise you’re just going to have to pay 2-3 times the cost for all offshore-made goods.

Ask yourself, is it fair to pull all these jobs away from other countries?

If you can wrap your head around the fact that we’re all stuck on this rock spinning through space together then it really doesn’t matter if you’re helping someone on the other side of the world feed their family or your neighbour.

#50

This is a decision that each team deserves to make themselves. Putting official FIRST rules on such issues puts too much political emphasis on the inspiration side of this program. Plus there’s the whole international aspect of this program that’s been mentioned numerous times in this thread.

Your questions are great, and they should be discussed with your team.
I know that my team makes decisions about buying parts based on weighing various values, like reliability, customer service, cost and purchasing local as much as possible. Some values are weighed more than others. It depends on the part, time of year and need.

If FIRST put an official rule on something like this, it would take away important discussions that individual teams can have about personal team values.

#51

One of the biggest lessons I wish i had learned in high school is how to work with foreign vendors. As I am now working for one of the largest toy producers in the US I working with China, India, and Ireland on a daily bases.

The learning curve is steep. The language divide is wide.
Take every opportunity you have to learn something more.

#52

One could also make the case that we as FIRST teams are exploiting the environment and ruining it for future generations. After all, we are using mined materials, fossil fuel products, and a good deal of energy (especially considering the number of overnight orders we place). Some teams are even sponsored by oil and gas companies! Lacking any specific data about FIRST competitions and teams as polluters, I’ll go ahead and make the broad assertion that we are having a substantial negative impact. What should we do? Petition FIRST to require that teams only use certified recycled materials? Eliminate plastics such as polycarbonate from FIRST robots? Boycott competitions that don’t show a measured reduction in energy usage? Quit?

Like everything else we do, participating in FIRST makes us part of a much larger system that has both negative and positive impacts over a broad range. Neither the “made in America” issue nor the hypothetical “polluter” issue is simple; both are real, but are so complex that the proposed solution (making it a requirement that FIRST use only “made in America” parts, in this case) would do nothing more than serve as a political gesture that would alienate some, and entirely fail to solve the problem, while making the FIRST experience significantly poorer overall.

#53
#54

I am glad this was pointed out.

As far as the pollution is concerned - that point you make here has crossed my mind several times.
The question we should ask ourselves in response:
was generating these waste products going to produce something worth doing it?

I’d like to say as an engineer that engineering should not just be about meeting deadlines and making what you were asked.
It should also carry with it the responsibility to identify the risk/benefits of what you are doing.

For the waste produced by FIRST operations we produce engineers and people that are sensitive to the engineering mindset.
That fosters a ‘can do’ attitude where people are motivated to explore the possibilities that might otherwise have been denied.
One of those people might someday manage to make sustained nuclear fusion work. How much pollution would that save?

On the topic of economics:
As others have said technology comes and goes.
Economic forces dictate some of the forces.
The willingness of those who engineer in our society to work for less dictates more forces.

When I helped propose building a 2015 FRC control system I proposed building it in America and specifically with vendors of capacity in NJ.
Why? The deadlines were short and I couldn’t afford miscommunications.
I couldn’t afford quality control issues and I can walk into those vendors and look for problems but it would cost big money to walk into my Korean vendors and look around (I’ve done it before).

So on it’s face I disagree that my motivation to make it my backyard was politically motivated.
It was practically motivated.
We could have solved the local tariff issues by local distribution points just like any other large corporation pulls off.

#55

Perhaps. But do you object in principle to the existence of foreign industry? Or just to the existence of international trade?

Specifically, what criteria do you feel should be met for nations to trade amongst each other, instead of trading within themselves?

Why presume that those jobs were in America to begin with, and have now flowed out? It’s not as if there was a time when American-made parts were the only ones on the market.

This is a fair question; so let’s discuss how we might go about answering it.

To start that process, a few clarifications would be beneficial. Could you be a bit more specific about the meaning of “long term”? (10 years? Within our lifetimes? Centuries?) Also, when you say “best”, for what constituency are you optimizing? (America? Human civilization? Earth?) It’s not wrong to propose different policies for different periods and constituencies—but if that’s the case, go ahead and present the framework to support that proposal.

#56

COTS has it’s problems which are often overlooked.

The United States Military is starting to discover that COTS isn’t always the best idea. Sure you save money on the R&D and in the near term you offload the cost of production however in the longer term the price of that savings might be too high.

When a system that depends on COTS outlives the expected and projected lifetime it’s entirely possible that the vendor(s) that provide the COTS parts will cease to be able to provide support when these systems lifetimes are extended to save money. When you are talking about systems of such enormous costs such as military systems it’s possible to find yourself having to engineer parts anyway with experience that was never internal because of COTS.

So I would argue that using COTS parts engineered without full disclosure required in any system runs risks. Move the production source for the COTS part into a place where the language and style is foreign to you and that problem is magnified.

This problem exists beyond hardware. I routinely work on enormously expensive software systems that people bought and that are closed source. If you sit down and review the application of that software you’ll realize you could: make it faster, make it easier, make it more reliable but you can’t because no one wants to own the effort or invest beyond consumerism.

It’s the same problem really. The idea you can shortcut the perspiration that leads to innovation taken a bit too far and no one wanting to accept that reality.

Also I’d like to indirectly respond to the question of foreign trade above. The issue with foreign trade is that foreign trade should not be mistaken to obey uniform commercial code or any sort of expectation of conduct. Literally many foreign ‘companies’ are extensions of the military industrial complexes that rule over their respective countries of origin. So in effect if these foreign ‘companies’ decide to rip you off realize that it is entirely possible to find yourself with no recourse (no one is going to bring military action over a box of junk). The exception to this rule is straight out capitalistic competition. For example: let’s take DC/DC converters sold by several sources from all over the world. In the absence of contracts you can buy from any place at any time. So if these people want to rely on your business they best produce something adequate in that case because at any time you can walk away. Course that works fantastic till you allow monopolies on resources required to make a product at all. Of course the price to you as a product designer using COTS DC/DC converters ‘protected’ by capitalistic competition is that you have to design your product to accept DC/DC converters in various shapes and sizes and maybe with slightly different inputs and outputs and you have to have just enough reserve stock to buffer bad lots and additional delays (it’s a balancing act). So in the end my perspective on this is not that ‘Made in America’ is always better. It’s that my expectations of my country and the society within it are based on a lifetime of experience in my country. There are some things we don’t do well here in America at any one time. If a foreign source can demonstrate to me consistent improvement over my local sources then I balance the risk/benefit equation in their favor because the show must go on.

The real risk is that everyone is too willing to think they can just buy innovation. Real innovation transcends the immediate transaction of funds and goods and leaves lasting positive impact on society. FIRST is real innovation. Look beyond the immediate product, the flow of funds and look at the long term impact. You can build a competitive FIRST robot with some cheap common tools or you can build a FIRST robot with a million dollar shop. It’s not just about the money and the jobs.

#57

Personally, I think that Supplier Selection would make a great discussion topic for a FIRST team. Catch phrases like Make in … can be dissected, better defined, and evaluated against other criteria such as economy, ecology, sustainability, reliability, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_USA gives background to what the phrase means.

Making students aware of the complexities and how to research to get beyond the catch-phrases, will allow them to make informed choices on their robot, team tshirts, website hosting, etc. It can also be helpful in their daily actions outside of FIRST.

A first step might be to research some of the elements in the KOP. Basic NI information is available on ni.com/company, and additional details of our own supplier selection criteria is available from there. Annual reports such as http://biz.yahoo.com/e/140220/nati10-k.html will provide additional material.

I’d be curious to hear about the outcome of such a discussion.

Greg McKaskle

#58

Nationalism is dumb, it’s saying I’m better than you because of where I or my parents were born.

Counterpoint to ‘money flowing overseas’ is Walmart. They have huge revenues, but suck money out of communities to do so, sending it to shareholders and the Waltons, 6 of whom have the same wealth (~$90B0 as the bottom 42% of this country. The money is staying in this country, but you don’t see that in the salaries or benefits of the people that work for Walmart.

#59

Nationalism might be dumb - but competing for the best of something is not by necessity nationalism.
The problem with nationalism is that there’s often no actual measurement involved - just bias.

It would be difficult to prove that the Walmart wealth is entirely within America even if the owners of that wealth are in America. With our complicated tax codes there’s every reason to believe that Walmart has accountants smart enough to offshore considerable amounts of money that they don’t need to pay for their workforce or operations in America. Hence the value in not adding to the cost of the workforce or operations in America that’s money they have to keep here.

It’s like CEOs that make $1. They don’t really make $1 in the real world. That’s just their salary and they live off the capital gains which are taxed differently. That’s how Warren Buffet often pays less tax than his employees.

I work on Wall Street. Money generally attracts money. Money gives a single person a voice that drowns out thousands of other voices. Money can allow people to get away with things that the rest of us would rot in jail for. Money in the hands of dictators and other violent people can buy weapons that can do enormous harm. Don’t blame the tool look at the intentions of the people wielding it.

#60

This post deserved more attention.

I agree that America can’t compete with Chinese prices, but there are other factors that come to play when deciding on where to buy from. Comparative advantage is a powerful thing. We can’t shy away from these questions, and i’m glad this discussion is being handled in a rational and respectful manor.

By the way, take it from someone who’s at his first internship in the CIS field: The jobs are still out there, but it’s not a guarantee that you can get one straight out of college if you don’t go the extra mile. There’s tough competition out there, so students will simply have to rise to meet the challenge. America needs to step it’s game up, and we are doing just that with this program. Imposing artificial limits within the program is the WRONG way to inspire students.