December 3, 2015 Industry Forum Blog How will it re-shape our business and daily lives? The best description I have found is this. “The creation of a digital thread that seamlessly ties together the flow of information from design through manufacturing to end consumers, including the full life cycle of the product.” Digital manufacturing is not just machines talking to machines on the shopfloor, but the shopfloor talking to design, maintenance, stores, sales, planning. Also, the business talking to suppliers, consumers and the actual product in use! I’ve shown some of these in this diagram. Digital manufacturing is also known as; Industry 4.0, Cyber physical systems (CPS), Internet of Everything, virtual manufacturing solutions and advanced manufacturing. It depends whose selling it! Why is it different to ERP, CAD or CMMS? Enterprise Resource Planning (for business activities), Computer Aided Design and Computerised Maintenance Management Systems only represent part of the overall picture. Most business will also have other digital systems; for controlling robots, supplying quotes, testing and validation. Typically none of them are linked together and so don’t feed each other information, without some form of manual intervention. Also the data collected is stored in “silos” and either analysed reactively or dumped. If the systems don’t exchange information they can’t enable changes, control settings or allow “learning”. And if data is kept in separate silos then no linkages can be made. So digital manufacturing is about the connection of all the different systems from one end of the supply chain to the final consumer. This allows end to end exchange of information. Three of the big enablers for this seamless connection and advanced analysis are the Internet of Things, cloud computing and big data analytics. What are the potential benefits? I’ve deliberately used the word potential here. It’s estimated that currently only 3% of equipment and systems are connected in some way. But it’s changing really rapidly. Most people in the business are talking about smart factories, smart machines, smart tools and smart supply chains as well as smart products being a widespread reality by 2020/25. This take up is helped as cloud technologies and scalability makes it increasingly affordable, even for SMEs. However these are the main benefits that are currently being, or will soon be, realised. Benefits in the factory and supply chain Reduced time for new product development. This is assisted by the use of virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D printing in design, prototyping, simulation and testing. These technologies are giving us; reduced potential for error, proactive issue resolution, cost reductions and quicker right first time build. Streamlined feedback loops, reporting processes and near real time information analysis. Improved energy and resource efficiency, resulting in a reduced carbon footprint. Improved predictive maintenance systems, in turn raising safety, performance, availability and reliability. Instant compilation and quicker retrieval of data for compliance purposes. Benefits across the customer interface Highly customised products are supplied, as increasingly flexible equipment allows individualised mass production. Cost reductions, as systems supporting installation, service and maintenance are linked. Enhanced purchasing experience, as smart products allow additional information to be seen by the customer using their smart phone. Improved customer service, as cloud based speech analytics continuously improves responses to the customer. Next week I will expand on some of these specific digital manufacturing techniques and how they will impact our improvement programmes. Thanks to AES, Bentley Motors Ltd., EveryWare Ltd, FORCAM, National Instruments, Cambridge Wireless and Siemens at the Advanced Engineering Show 2015, UK. Your visions of the future and enthusiasm inspired me to write these blogs.
