The Manufacturing 2008 Executive Summary provides a concise view of North American manufacturing production metrics and best practices to help manufacturers how to improve across the United States, Canada and Mexico benchmark their operations and better understand how to improve. Manufacturing 2008 Executive Summary presents the combined data from this year's surveys in tables and charts for North American plants as well as for each country, and focuses analysis on key takeaways from the data and significant differences. This paper includes key findings related to the following topics: labor turnover, training, improvements, cost control, and investments.