story about Dell and how their engineers are on the assembly line daily trying to find ways to save time and money and produce machines more efficiently. A savings of one screw translates to 4 seconds of production (x 40,000 machines a day, etc). We don’t get this when we outsource. We don’t see the efficiencies–we just get a cheap product. Eventually other countries will be more efficient than the US, simply because they see what is being done on the front lines of production. The labor costs of a PC are “roughly 10 bucks,” Mr. Rollins said, meaning that payroll costs account for maybe 2 percent of the overall cost of the typical Dell PC. Five years ago, it took two workers 14 minutes to build a PC; it now takes a single worker roughly five minutes to do the same. Interesting.]]>
How to outmanufacture the Chinese