Boeing moved production from Seattle, where they had people with experience building airplanes, to North Charleston, South Carolina, and cut pay. Of course they now have people who don't know what they are doing.
There's a more general problem. Who goes to college to learn how to set up a factory?
Where do you go to learn that?
That's a difficult skill, and it helps to have done it a few times as a junior before you're in charge. What happens if you don't know how is that you have to let the people who sell you the machinery set up your factory. This works for simple stuff, like a bakery, which you can buy turnkey. More complex stuff, not so much. Worse, much of the knowledge doesn't transfer. If you know how to design a production line for metal furniture, that may not translate well to batteries. One of the things that auto manufacturers have painfully discovered is that a battery plant is partly a chemical plant, which is not something automakers know much about.
Machine design is quite hard, not that many people are good at it, and it pays less than coding webcrap. The US used to have people who were good at this, and most of them were laid off in the 1980s.
The real culprit is false accounting. If it's awkward to put on a spreadsheet, it doesn't get counted as being valuable.
There's an episode of This American Life about IIRC a sausage factory that gets moved, and the sausages for some reason do not taste the same. The tacit knowledge embedded in the old factory is an example of this effect. You think you know how something works, so you make decisions based on that, and it turns out your spreadsheet was wrong.
The same thing is the case with your example. It's easy to count the salaries and the cost of the new site, along with the expenses for the machinery.
Outsourcing is another one of these things, and problems are compounded when it's not just counting the costs/benefits correctly, but doing do at an appropriate time. You send your multi-year coding project abroad, spreadsheet costs are lower, manager who did it gets promoted, project falls apart.
"Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information and equipment. Industrial engineering is central to manufacturing operations."
In the university I attended, the engineering school had a degree program for it.
Also, I'd presume that depending on what the factory produces, you'd have electrical, chemical, mechanical, aerospace, etc. engineers involved in designing and building the factory.
This degree is quite popular in Israel. Because it's relatively easy and probably interesting. You learn many subjects(people, money, knowledge, information and equipment) but not in that much depth.
graduates of that degree work in working factories, manage people and optimize processes. I don't think they go into deep technical subjects.
That's very different from what Animats described.
It's related. If you have a working factory, data collection and optimization can make it better. If you have a vacant lot and money, that's a different problem.
I'm reading Ashlee Vance’s “When the Heavens Went on Sale”. This describes most of the smaller space launch startups, which he visited at length, including the launch sites in Outer Nowhere. Each of them had to start manufacturing rockets from nothing. How they approached this, who succeeded and who failed, and why, is worth a read.
Of course. As in any field of work, new graduates get entry level jobs and learn by working alongside more experienced practitioners. (E.g., someone who just graduated with a CS degree isn't likely to know how to ship robust, scalable and maintainable software - that's something you learn from experience.)
Some endeavors require historical knowledge, aircraft engineering being one of them. If you break the chain, you lose it; policies that were developed over decades are discarded. "Why do we need to do it this way, this other way is faster and cheaper!" No one is around to explain why any more, so the lesson is learned the hard way, again.
There's a more general problem. Who goes to college to learn how to set up a factory? Where do you go to learn that? That's a difficult skill, and it helps to have done it a few times as a junior before you're in charge. What happens if you don't know how is that you have to let the people who sell you the machinery set up your factory. This works for simple stuff, like a bakery, which you can buy turnkey. More complex stuff, not so much. Worse, much of the knowledge doesn't transfer. If you know how to design a production line for metal furniture, that may not translate well to batteries. One of the things that auto manufacturers have painfully discovered is that a battery plant is partly a chemical plant, which is not something automakers know much about.
Machine design is quite hard, not that many people are good at it, and it pays less than coding webcrap. The US used to have people who were good at this, and most of them were laid off in the 1980s.