Computers: Computer-aided manufacturing

The use of computers to control manufacturing has long been routine in continuous-process industries, such as chemicals and oil refining, but only in the past several years has it been introduced in batch-manufacturing industries, such as metal working. The metal-working industries employ by far the largest share of industrial workers in all the advanced countries, and a large percentage of their products are manufactured in medium-sized batches, ranging from hundreds to thousands of products in each batch. It is not feasible to produce such batches by rigid mechanized techniques, like those used in the large-batch automotive industry. To speed medium-range production, the flexibility of computerized automation is needed.