It may not come as much of a surprise that many people have difficulty contextualizing manufacturing.  What is it?  What product is produced?  What kind of an organization manufactures a product? 

Manufacturing is a vast employment sector, and I’m not sure there is a clear and concise way to adequately describe it.  In an effort to bring some understanding to one of the many facets of the topic, I’d like to refer the reader to “The Factory Fallacy,” written by Peter Zelinski  on Modern Machine Shop, about the difference between the terms “factory” and “manufacturing.”  Many people seem to use these terms interchangeably, and yet, they are not truly synonymous. 

In one paragraph, the author explains the idea of a factory:

The word connotes a large building or complex where an established product is produced through an intricate series of repetitive steps. A job shop, for example, is not really a factory. Neither is a tool and die shop, nor is a prototyping firm, nor are a great many contract suppliers. Yet all of these places engage in manufacturing.

Read the entire article for a more thorough discussion of the differences between these two terms, and the ways in which people tend to use the terms interchangeably.