Measuring month-to-month changes in activity at durable goods and discrete parts manufacturing facilities.
A Quick Look at the State of the Industry – Is your business moving with or counter to the trend?
Trends in Backlogs – When the industry will buy equipment, when order lead times will shorten or lengthen, and when prices for equipment will rise and fall.
Data Deep Dives – Which industries and processes are driving the performance of your industry.
A Quick Look at the State of Your Customers' Business – Are your sales following the trends of your customers?
Sales and Revenue Forecasting – Backlogs lead spending by 10-14 months, giving you a look at the potential trend of your revenue a year ahead.
Targeted Marketing – Target your sales and marketing efforts by following trends in different industries, regions, and plant sizes.
A Quick look at the State of Manufacturing – Understand the business and trends of part producers in the durable goods supply chain.
Model Building – Build models to forecast the revenue of suppliers to manufacturers.
Investment Risk Assessment – Determine if a company in a particular industry is a good lending risk.
The Gardner Business Index (GBI) -just like the Purchasing Manager Indices compiled around the world- is calculated as a diffusion index. A diffusion index is at its core a weighted average meaning that it behaves differently from the majority of charts used in the business world. Understanding how the results are calculated will help you to both understand what a particular value is indicating along with how to properly compare readings over time.
The Gardner Business Index (GBI) stabilized in July.
The Gardner Business Index (GBI) accelerated contraction in June.
The Gardner Business Index (GBI) contracted a little faster in May.
Gardner offers five versions of the Gardner Business Index to meet the specific needs of a wide range of customers from fortune 100 Financial Firms to small manufacturing shops.
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Access to the overall GBI, which is calculated at the “All” level for process, industry, region, and plant sizes, as well as each process at the “All” level of industry, region, and plant size.
Processes reported include composites fabricating, finishing, metalworking, mold making, precision machining, and plastics processing.
Entire history of GBI data, including the most recent month, on the first of the month.
Prior month’s data available on the first of each month.
Historical data back to 2011.
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Standard Subscription
PLUS data for every unique combination of process, industry, region, and plant size for nearly 1,800 unique combinations of manufacturing business activity.
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Receive the same data made available in the Comprehensive Subscription.
PLUS receive an early look at each month’s results: Get preliminary data results several days before the end of each month after more than ½ of all respondents have replied to our survey. Then, on the first of the following month receive the full dataset provided in the Comprehensive Subscription.
Each month Gardner Intelligence surveys the North American durable goods manufacturing facilities on the current state of: New orders, Production, Backlog, Employment, Exports, Supplier Deliveries, Material Prices, Prices Received and Future Business Expectations.
We create a diffusion index for each of the above questions. The total index is an average of the first six sub-indices in the list above.
In addition to the nine factors above, each facility is asked how much they will spend on capital equipment in the next 12 months. We report the results as the average spending per plant. An individual facility’s planned spending is never shared.
Gardner Intelligence is the research and industry intelligence sector of Gardner Business Media, which reaches readers at more than 100,000 durable goods and discrete parts manufacturing facilities every month. We survey 50,000 of those facilities each month, averaging about 600 responses to each survey.
The Gardner Business Index email survey is sent out the second-to-last and last Tuesday of every month.
Most other diffusion indices focus solely on large companies, which we define as a manufacturing facility with more than 250 employees, because they are used to forecast GDP and other macroeconomic measures. This works because a significant percent of manufacturing production occurs in these large facilities.
However, there is a still a great deal of activity in smaller manufacturing facilities that is extremely important to any company selling equipment, materials, or other supplies to durable goods and discrete parts manufacturers.
For example, plants with 250 or more employees buy about $2.0-2.5 billion of machine tools every year. But facilities with fewer than 20 employees buy about $1.0-1.5 billion of machine tools every year. So, the smallest facilities spend about 60 percent of the total of the largest facilities. There are just 5,000 metalworking facilities with more than 250 employees and more than 35,000 metalworking facilities with fewer than 20 employees.
“There are just 5,000 metalworking facilities with more than 250 employees and more than 35,000 metalworking facilities with fewer than 20 employees.”
Each facility that responds to the survey has associated with it four pieces of firmographic data:
Each facility can be in only one industry, region, and plant size. However, facility responses can count in more than one process based on our knowledge of what that facility does.
For every combination of process, industry, region, and plant size, we report all the data in “How is the index created?” above. In addition, we report the number of facilities that respond in each unique combination of process, industry, region, and plant size.
Each subscription includes monthly updates with the latest data. In addition, subscribers also receive access to our historical data since 2011.
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To purchase a subscription, call 513-527-8800 and ask for a Gardner Intelligence team member.
Or, use the email form below.
The World Machine Tool Survey is a comprehensive study of the global machine tool economy, conducted on an annual basis by Gardner Intelligence.
The Capital Spending Survey is the leading tool for understanding projected spending on capital equipment in the Metalworking, Plastics Processing, and Additive Manufacturing industries.
The Gardner Business Index (GBI) is a diffusion index measuring month-to-month changes in activity at durable goods and discrete parts manufacturing facilities.
Top Shops is a benchmarking and recognition program designed to help manufacturers build their business.
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