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Annual Survey of Manufactures
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The Annual Survey of Manufacturers (ASM) provides sample estimates of statistics for all manufacturing establishments with one or more paid employee. The ASM provides key intercensal measures of manufacturing activity, products, and location for the public and private sectors. The ASM provides the best current measure of current U.S. manufacturing industry outputs, inputs, and operating status, and is the primary basis for updates of the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). The ASM is a source of statistics on employment, payroll, supplemental labor costs, cost of materials consumed, operating expenses, value of shipments, value added by manufacturing, detailed capital expenditures, fuels and electric energy used, and inventories.
The project review timeframes above do not apply to applications that request access to confidential data assets commingled with data that are either not owned, or are only co-owned, by the statistical agency(s) or unit(s) and require approval from third parties not subject to this policy (e.g., state and local government agencies).
Detailed Methodology
The Census Bureau conducts the ASM in each of the 4 years between the economic census which is collected for years ending in 2 and 7. The economic census is the sample frame from which the ASM is chosen and presents more detailed data than the ASM. Each of the establishments canvassed in the ASM are classified in 1 of 473 manufacturing industries in accordance with the industry definitions in the 1997 NAICS Manual. In the NAICS system, an industry is generally defined as a group of establishments that have similar production processes. To the extent practical, the system uses supply based or production-oriented concepts in defining industries. The resulting group of establishments must be significant in terms of number, value added by manufacture, value of shipments, and number of employees.In the 1997 Manufacturing Economic Census, all establishments were classified in particular industries based on the products they produced. If an establishment made products of more than one industry, it was classified in the industry with the largest product value.The ASM is conducted on an establishment basis. A company operating at more than one location is required to file a separate report for each location or establishment selected in the sample. Companies engaged in distinctly different lines of activity at one location are requested to submit separate reports if the plant records permit such a separation and if the activities are substantial in size. Occasionally, special supplemental questions are added to the ASM in order to collect information on specific topics of interest. For example, detailed information on fuels consumed: quantity and cost of coal, coke, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, natural gas and liquefied petroleum gases were collected as part of the 1975-81 ASM. Supplemental information on the use of computer networks for ordering supplies, managing inventories, and managing sales, etc. were collected as part of the 1999 and 2000 ASM.
Pandemic related questions were added in 2020.
To link to external business data, also request County Business Patterns Business Register. SURVU_ID is called EMPUNIT_ID in some surveys.. ALPHA (Census firm ID) . FIRMID (Census firm ID) . PARENT_ID (Parent ID for multi-units) . SURVU_ID (Census establishment ID) . LBDNUM (Census longitudinal establishment ID)