Three days and counting…….

Eight days of IMTS. Are you kidding? This is an idea from yesteryear. If you compressed IMTS to three days, everybody would come for those three days. Comdex, the National Hardware Show, big medical conferences – nobody does more than three or four days anymore.

The programming doesn’t even fill three days now. The weekend is slow, especially Sunday. Perhaps the downtown restaurants and hotels like the added traffic, but IMTS should be for the participants, not the city it is located in. And for the participants, eight days or six days is a big inconvenience and physically bone crushing.

We are in a period when manufacturing lives under constant pressure to reduce costs – go lean.

IMTS continues to be the show of excess – too big, too long, too expensive. This may temporarily serve the interests of the organizers, but ultimately the exhibitors will expect the same lean performance from IMTS as their customers demand from them.