I try to spend one day per week in a factory.
I’m either working out of our own Neptune production site here in Massachusetts or one of our amazing customer’s facilities around the USA. It doesn’t matter if the factory is making CT scanners, next generation electric vehicle components, life saving medical devices, or carbon neutral consumer products - every factory has one thing in common. They are staffed by talented, hard working, and intelligent engineers.
But there are not enough of those engineers to go around.
The west needs more manufacturing engineers.
Six years ago Inc interviewed Tim Cook about why Apple manufactures their most valuable products in China. The entire interview is worth reading, but two quotes have stuck in my mind since the day I first saw them.
“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields”
“The reason [to manufacture in China] is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.”
Western product and engineering companies are reliant on China because of the concentration of high quality manufacturing engineering talent. China doesn’t just manufacture products at scale - they train manufacturing talent at scale.
The United States and our allies can build all of the chip fabrication facilities, battery factories, and N95 mask production lines we want and we still will not be able to match China’s manufacturing capabilities unless we fix our painful lack of manufacturing engineering talent. TSMC has already delayed the opening of their new Arizona fab once due to a lack of talent in the USA. A Michelin star kitchen won’t produce amazing food without talented chefs and a manufacturing investment super cycle doesn’t mean anything without the right talent to make the factories sing.
Lumafield is here to help.
Today we’re proud to announce Atlas, a revolutionary co-pilot for manufacturing engineering. Atlas is a multimodal generative artificial intelligence agent that can analyze real world manufacturing data, solve your hardest engineering problems, and put the entire world’s manufacturing engineering knowledge base at your fingertips. Our vision for Atlas is as simple as it is ambitious: 10x the capacity of every design and manufacturing engineer in the west.
Atlas is only possible because of the incredible software that our team built over the past four years Voyager. Voyager is the world's best (and only!) cloud based 3D data analysis platform. Until today Neptune has been the sole path to get data into Voyager. With the release of Atlas we’re changing that. Starting now any engineer can bring their own 3D data to Voyager and analyze it using Atlas. You can create a free Voyager account and try Atlas for yourself right now.
The future is going to be manufactured somewhere. Today we have a choice to make. Do we want to rely on western liberal democracies or a single totalitarian regime for the physical goods that drive our economy? Do we want the factory of the future to live in Shenzhen or in Phoenix? Do we want to invest in creating new manufacturing talent in Guangdong or in the midwest?
I know what I want - and I hope that Atlas can help make that dream a reality.
Build on,
Eduardo