In December, the nonpartisan Council on Competitiveness issued a landmark report, Make: An American Manufacturing Movement, that provides dozens of recommendations for addressing the many challenges facing U.S. manufacturers. In this podcast, Jack McDougle, the council’s senior vice president for manufacturing, discusses the council’s vision for reviving U.S. manufacturing. Check out this sneak preview of McDougle’s May 2 keynote address to start Tech ManufactureXPO.

Cognex Corp. makes vision inspection systems for manufacturers worldwide. Recently, John Stamos, sales engineer for Cognex, spoke with Jim Camillo, a senior editor of Assembly magazine, about the impact of lighting and 3D technologies on current and future vision inspection systems. The interview was conducted after a small-group presentation by Stamos in Chicagoland.

To steal a line from Mark Twain, many people complain about outsourcing, but few of them do anything about it. One person who is trying to do something about it is Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to persuading U.S. manufacturers to bring work back home from overseas. In this podcast, Moser talks about his organization and the software he developed for calculating the total costs of offshoring. Check out this sneak preview of Moser's May 4 keynote address to start Tech ManufactureXPO.

In this third installment of Bosch Rexroth's "Lean Manufacturing Audio Series," veteran product engineer and Lean Learning Center founder Jamie Flinchbaugh talks about how OEMs and manufacturers can design their equipment to be more effective, more productive and more in tune with a lean manufacturing environment.

In this second installment of Bosch Rexroth's "Lean Manufacturing Audio Series," Jamie Flinchbaugh, a veteran product engineer, and founder and partner of the Lean Learning Center (Novi, MI) discusses how lean principles can be applied to the engineering process to help improve work quality and productivity.

In this first installment of Bosch Rexroth's "Lean Manufacturing Audio Series," Jamie Flinchbaugh, a founder and partner of the Lean Learning Center (Novi, MI) and co-author of the popular book The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean talks about what lean organizations need to do to make sure supervisors contribute fully in the effort to be lean.