At the same time, "advanced manufacturing" covers many complementary developments in manufacturing during this period, including high-tech products and processes as well as clean, green and flexible manufacturing. It also embodies the importance of a high-performing workforce in creating an agile production system that can flexibly switch between mass production and custom manufacturing based on customer needs.
Looking ahead to 2024, Carl Haycock, Director of UK operations at Domino Print Sciences, considers the next stage of change and identifies five key trends to monitor over the coming year.
Digital tools for optimization
Digital tools, including cloud computing and automation, are increasingly being used to provide real-time insights and optimizations across production facilities, helping manufacturers improve efficiency, reduce waste and enhance resilience.
Contrary to the belief of many manufacturers, digitization doesn't have to be an "eat the elephant" approach. In fact, by using easily accessible digital tools to target specific areas of the production process on a small scale, common and costly production problems can be easily solved, thus helping to improve overall production efficiency.
For example, simply add automatic coding solutions and visual inspection systems. It allows enterprises to simplify product conversion, limit manual data entry, and optimize product and coding quality control. And improved reporting - all of which can facilitate access to more information about the product. A better understanding of production processes and production lines, which in turn can pave the way for more creative solutions in the future.
Automation increases manufacturing resilience
Over the past few years, we've seen considerable volatility, with manufacturers struggling to maintain productivity while facing shrinking margins, and consumers feeling the pinch of rising prices and longer delivery times. In this environment, it is becoming increasingly clear that automation tools are increasingly valuable in helping manufacturers improve the operational resilience of their production processes.
From managing labor and skill shortages, redeploying existing workers to value-added improvement activities, to reducing operational costs and eliminating errors, automation has played a major role in helping companies protect themselves from the many challenges that manufacturing has faced over the past few years.
There is evidence that continued investment and optimization can position these businesses well for future economic uncertainty. In fact, research from Bain & Company shows that companies' gains and losses are more significant during periods of economic uncertainty than during periods of stability, underscoring that investing in automation is an important priority for companies as they adjust their strategies to weather the downturn.
Scalability and sustainability through collaboration
One of the great global challenges that advanced manufacturing seeks to address is sustainability, specifically how to ensure that growth and progress are both economically and environmentally sustainable.
The path to sustainable development involves addressing many economic, social, and environmental challenges and requires coordinated efforts and cooperation with various stakeholders with potentially competing short-term goals to ensure that growth and innovation in one area does not have unforeseen negative impacts on others.
The development of sustainable packaging solutions, for example, requires collaboration across the value chain - from manufacturers, packaging suppliers, coding and marking providers, to retailers, end users, and waste and recycling companies. These new systems require significant changes in packaging design, management and technology. In all cases, collaboration between brands, packaging suppliers, retailers and technology partners becomes critical.
In the coming years, as companies increasingly look to develop new systems and solutions to enable sustainability, collaboration, and especially open innovation - sharing and receiving information openly and collaborating with individuals, businesses, and institutions around common goals to drive progress - will help ensure that businesses can make significant changes in ways that benefit everyone.
Human-computer interaction
In his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Professor Carl Schwab, founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, called on leaders and citizens to work together to "shape a future that benefits all by putting people first, empowering them and constantly reminding them." We ourselves believe that all these new technologies are first and foremost tools made by people for people.
Today's discussion around AI inevitably raises concerns about the displacement of human workers - a situation that has occurred in every period of human growth going back to the first industrial Revolution. However, at least in the short term, the opposite may be true. Indeed, businesses should be prepared for increased interaction between manual workers and digital tools.
In fact, Forbes says AI will enable employees to focus on more meaningful and high-value activities in the coming years, including design and management tasks. At the same time, both MIT and Statista believe that human-machine collaboration will be the future of manufacturing - a 2016 MIT study found that teams made up of humans and robots can be 85% more productive than teams made up of humans or robots alone.
Preparing the workforce for AI projects will be an ongoing process. As technology evolves, businesses must invest in learning and development to ensure employees always have the skills and knowledge they need to progress.
Predictive thinking method
Just as the industry is moving towards digital, automated and smart solutions, so are today's service and maintenance technicians and engineers. These people have been playing key roles in manufacturing operations; When there is a machine failure or problem that brings production to a halt, service or maintenance engineers are often the go-to people who trust that they can identify and fix the problem to get the system back online.
However, this traditional "break and repair" model of service and support cannot meet the requirements of modern manufacturing. Machine uptime is essential to ensure that customer service levels are effectively met, while minimizing excess inventory and other forms of wasteful investment. At worst, waiting for a professional service technician to travel across country to the site can be extremely disruptive, costly, and harmful to the environment. Readiness can only be achieved through a fundamental shift in service and support, with a focus on predictive uptime monitoring and proactive quality improvement.
Service engineers of the future will have diverse skills, adding remote consulting capabilities and knowledge and understanding of data analysis to their technical knowledge and face-to-face interaction skills. This new class of data-driven service engineers will be able to identify and fix potential machine problems before they occur, and even before manufacturers are aware that there is a problem.
The rapid development of manufacturing production lines has accelerated over the past few decades due to the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions and a global focus on sustainability. In this new advanced manufacturing environment, digital tools - from coding automation and automated visual inspection systems to data visibility and cloud-based remote monitoring systems - underpin line optimization and business resilience, support the development of sustainable solutions, and support a new generation of workforce that supports and augments skills through automation.
