One reason would be, according to Doug Woods, president of AMT—The Association for Manufacturing Technology, to look “for those things that will help me make it through the next recession.”
While things are going well currently, there are many uncertainties that manufacturing is facing now and more loom beyond the horizon: the shortage of skilled workers, cutbacks in defense spending, tax cuts, tax increases, interest rates, the specter of infl ation and, of course, the upcoming election, which may impact policy and procedure in yet unknown ways. When he was a business owner in Rochester, NY, Woods says, “I went [to IMTS] because I was trying to fi gure out for my business how to do things that I couldn’t do before, that I can do more effi ciently. It’s hard to fi nd a time or a place that has the scope of information and demonstrations where you can compare machines, technologies and techniques side by side. Here is a place where not just the salesmen, but the engineers and the technicians and even the CEOs are there
The Rally Fighter, a product of Local Motors’ concept for crowd-powered automotive manufacturing, design, and technology, will be on display in the Emerging Technology Center.
to ask all the questions you want and get all the information you need.”
Considering that IMTS 2012 will showcase better than 1500 exhibitors in an area of 1.1 million ft2
(102,300 m2 ) it
is little wonder that the show is expected to draw upwards of 82,000 attendees—or that these attendees will be able to come away with the information they need.
When IMTS, the largest display and demonstration of man- ufacturing technology in the Western Hemisphere, returns to McCormick Place for its 29th iteration, one of the things at-