Guest blog post for NIST by Patrick Gallagher, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology, and the director of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

We’ve been hearing a lot about manufacturing, especially advanced manufacturing, these days. Things like U.S. manufacturing is:
• Critical to innovation since it’s responsible for most of our private-sector research and development
• Increasingly about sophisticated, computer-driven, highly productive worksites requiring skilled workers
• A growing source of good jobs

What we don’t hear about as often are specific cases where U.S. manufacturers are using new technologies to diversify their markets, improve their products, and create or retain jobs. I was fortunate today to visit one such company, Omega Plastics Inc., located in Clinton Township, Michigan, about an hour outside Detroit.

The event was part of a “Best Practice Tour” sponsored by the Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (MMTC), an affiliate of NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP).

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