CARLSBAD -- As falling revenue pressures businesses to cut several hundred thousand jobs each month, Ed Neff says now is a great time to forge ahead.

Neff's company, SMAC, makes robotic fingers that other manufactures use on assembly lines and for quality control. For his customers, cutting costs doesn't always mean ordering fewer parts, Neff said. Sometimes it means redesigning production lines with more automation.

Neff said some of his customers, particularly computer and electronics manufacturers, cut and delayed orders in November and December, though most are trickling back in. Custom orders for newly designed fingers, meanwhile, have poured in as manufacturers stress efficiency in their own production, Neff said.

"They're not making stuff, so they've got time to improve," Neff said. "It's really a fun time to do what we do."

A range of efficiency improvements have made San Diego County's manufacturing sector more profitable in the last 10 years, said Kelly Cunningham, an economist with the market-oriented San Diego Institute for Policy Research. The sector has downsized to 97,400 workers in February from 122,000 in February 2009, according to state figures.

Wages in the sector, meanwhile, have grown by an annual average of 0.7 percent since 2001 after taking inflation into account, according to a North County Times analysis of data from the California and federal labor departments. In contrast, the inflation-adjusted wages of other private-sector workers haven't changed in that time period, according to the analysis.

Most lower-skill manufacturing jobs have left for lower-wage economies, leaving jobs that rely on computers, automation and education rather than rote tasks for humans, Cunningham said.

"Labor is very expensive in California," he said. "Anything that required a lot of labor has moved away."

Neff said his own company has maintained a "no-layoffs" policy since its founding in 1990 in Murrieta. Forty of its product designers were SMAC machinists until automation made their jobs redundant.

SMAC's mechanical fingers vary in length and width, from about the size of an index finger to that of a well-muscled arm. Most are cylinders with lightweight shafts that extend out and back in, rather than bending back and forth like a human finger. But the shaft-tips sense pressure in several models that are made for testing computer keyboards and touch-screens. Shafts in some models also rotate, a function that's useful in machines for checking the precision of screws and screw threads.

SMAC's niche is obscure, and far removed from the nation's consumers, whose massive debts and rising unemployment rates have forced them to cut their spending sharply in the last year. Even so, SMAC counts as a moderately large manufacturer for North San Diego County, with about 150 workers at a pair of facilities just north of McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad. The company also has a total of 25 employees at smaller factories in Taiwan, China, Great Britain and the Netherlands.

The company's four-letter name is not an acronym, but rather a melding of "Mac" and "SMC," the names of two similar companies from Neff's past: He spent several years in Japan as an engineer at Sintered Metal Corp., a much larger Japanese company that makes air cylinders.

Mac Valves, a Michigan-based manufacturer of pneumatic valves, was run for years by Neff's father, James, and is now run by his brother Robert.

SMAC's cylinders extend and contract with electromagnetic current, which Neff said allows them to move more precisely and respond more sensitively than air-powered cylinders. Customers include a Swiss watchmaker, and a soup company that uses the cylinders to knock faulty cans off a conveyor belt, he said.

Neff says he aims to reduce the prices of his products by 35 percent every five years, meanwhile developing new cylindrical fingers that are smaller, are more precise, extend more quickly, and deliver larger profit margins. The latest finger, a cylinder 12 millimeters in diameter, is suited for testing cell-phone keypads. The company's designers typically develop a product for a specific customer and incorporate what they learn into a standard model.

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (760) 740-5444 or cbagley@nctimes.com. Bagley blogs about local economic trends at http://bizblogs.nctimes.com.