Look to your left, now look to your right, now up, down and all around. What do you see? No, it’s not the latest dance craze. Unless you’re standing out in the middle of the forest — and if you are while reading this, kudos on the Wi-Fi signal — everything you saw is the result of manufacturing.
According to reports by Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI), national statistics imply that manufacturing is of minor importance to economic activity. Traditionally, findings show manufacturing makes up 11 percent of today’s economy and 9 percent of the American workforce.
However, those numbers don’t take into account the whole picture, starting with the upstream supply chain and ending at retailers and customers.
According to MAPI, manufacturing’s footprint is much larger than just the value added at the factory. “Manufacturing plant activities lie near the center of a substantial and complex value chain that is composed of an upstream supply chain that gathers materials and services and a downstream sales chain that moves goods to market and sells and services goods,” according to MAPI.
Considering all of that, MAPI says that manufacturing’s value chain actually accounts for one-third of the U.S. economy and one-third of the workforce.
Be sure to check out more information in this video, produced by MAPI. It shows how the manufacturing value chain is much larger than most people think.