Essential Manufacturing

3Typical Manufacturing Industries

3.1 Introduction

Manufacturing covers a broad spectrum of activity ranging from large multinational companies employing thousands of people to very small enterprises comprised of a few individuals. If every type of manufacturing industry was to be covered in this text, many volumes would be necessary. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to simply provide a brief overview of some of them.

In Chapter 1, it was shown that industry can be considered as primary, secondary and tertiary, and that manufacturing constituted the secondary category. In fact, in modern manufacturing industries the boundary between manufacturing as a secondary industry often merges with service industry activities. For instance, research, development, design, marketing and selling would appear to be tertiary industries but they are often an integral part of large manufacturing companies.

Manufacturing processes themselves can also be considered as composed of three categories; primary, secondary and tertiary. For example, in primary processes raw material such as iron ore is processed with other raw materials to produce cast iron or steel and so on. Similarly, crude oil can be further processed to produce petroleum or plastics. In secondary processes the materials produced at the primary stage are formed into more easily worked shapes or components. For example, components can be created by forming steel into rods then machining and plastics can be further processed ...