What's driving "Frontiers of Manufacturing" today.

This article provides a glimpse of the state of manufacturing today, trends and transformations that are impacting the industry and how critical technologies and initiatives like Industrial Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and Cognitive Intelligence are shaping the future of this industry. It also attempts so share a point of view on what it beholds for companies and its workforce!

Reality bites - How often do we know, how products we use or see around us are manufactured or built..?….Yes, we do know sometime looking at labels and prints that they are manufactured somewhere but have a vague idea “how” they are made.. Our long belief has been that products are manufactured in factories that require hard work and labour. Rewind a couple of decades earlier and you would have seen men and women work long hours in different shifts from home to work to make a living. The present is no different - expect we can reach out to the workers whenever needed. They are just a call away. Communication and transportation has eased and made their lives a little better.. Fast forward a couple of years and think what could be the future..! The possibilities are endless and sometime interesting to see how technology, materials and manufacturing systems will play a vital role in defining the future.. Automation and robots have displaced factor workers in the last decade or so.

The reality – A vast majority of today’s manufacturing workforce isn’t aware of what disruptions are coming their way, especially in emerging economies.

I often wonder what will happen to those millions of factory workers in the next 15-20 years whose livelihood depends on working at the nearest plant and factory. The reality is that the change is happening much faster than we can see it coming.. A couple of the years ahead when you look back you would not say..”Ohh that was a revolution you never saw coming..” Many of us are caught off guard and do not even realize until it hits us hard. Welcome to the “to be” autonomous world. From driverless cars, drones, robots and everything that is our creation. Time for each one of the factory worker or the knowledge worker to think - unless you are skilled in something that isn’t so easily replicable, chances are that your job might not exist. Forget about jobs, the average life of manufacturing companies is itself shrinking. The birth, scale and existence of companies and economies is churning faster that we could think. Uncertainty is the new norm.

Big questions - All around we keep seeing how technology has been embraced in manufacturing plants. While the adoption has been slow, some have really leap frogged. During a recent visit to a manufacturing facility in India I could see how technology has been embraced and what the future be-holds even in a small and medium size enterprise that manufactures aerospace parts as a tier 2 supplier. Given the capital and technology they are ready to take the leap as a tier 1. As an Industrial engineer it has always intrigued me what the future factory would look like in this smart age. We were taught time and motion study and its applicability of production lines. Would those jobs of Industrial engineers really exist? Will there be people around taking to each other planning, making production decisions, troubleshooting and solving issues? How much of technology would have role to play in the future? To what extent would be technology relevant? While the questions are endless, factories have already started to embrace change.

Speed of change – Looking back, historical revolutions and facts tend to provide a certain correlation to prevailing socio economic conditions during that era, which might have led to the transformation of industries and manufacturing in general.  While a lot has been learnt and talked about the past industrial revolutions and how certain transformations have impacted the progress of manufacturing, the chart above shows few mega social themes that were present during the same era. From the chart, it might be worth to look at some of the possible correlations on how the social situations have paved the way for progress. While a sociologist could throw more light on this and help one understand, what I would like to delve upon is more on how industrialization and manufacturing has progressed. Clearly the earlier era (upto 1900) was towards converting different forms of energy that eventually could be harnessed for the benefit of society and industries at large.

The first wave of industrialization had begun during this era which was predominately towards mechanization for power generation. While this progressed and advanced, the second wave of industrialization was already under progress with focus on mechanization for labour and material productivity, where the objective was to move raw materials, parts on production and assembly lines faster from one place to another using drives and motors. This incidentally is the era where machines and electrical devices were introduced to quicken the process.

The current era and the near future is all about being autonomously intelligent..!

The following era was all about automation for speed, accuracy, quality, miniaturization and better control. Sensors, microelectronics, high speed computing, embedded software paved the developments.  We are privy to most of this development but the brute force is the connectivity of billions of devices (machines, equipment’s etc) with sensors and gateways to form a network of things in parallel to the already exploding network of people and internet. Clearly a certain amount of inventions and technological interventions have paved these transformations in industrial manufacturing over years. What is important to however know and ponder is that speed at which these revolutions are taking place. It no longer requires 50 long years to bring a revolutionary change in the industry. The time for change is shrinking and in many sectors it is totally transformed in less than 10 years.

Manufacturing Trends and Imperatives for Companies

The present state of manufacturing has reached a state of action, where either the accelerate change or be ready to be disrupted.  Here, I will attempt to cover a few disruptive trends that are directly impacting the state of manufacturing.

• Sensors – Sensors are like heartbeat of the factory and plant asset. The more we want to take care of such assets the more significant role sensors would have. Today, sensors are being produced in all forms, shapes, size and price starts from less than a dollar and goes up to thousands of dollars. The cost of sensors is reducing by the day and their adoption in various applications increasing multi-fold. Recent studies indicate that growth of sensors in factories from 2014 to 2020 will be 4 times. Sensors have traditionally been part of the factories for various applications form monitoring temperature, pressure, humidity, product quality, plant air-water quality and many other applications. In addition to sensors, today transducers, transmitters, varied sensing and energy converting devices which are part of the factory and plant network are being connected in some form or the other so that they can be used to monitor operating conditions and their data shared in real time over a high speed industrial bus. The data is then harnessed to make real-time intelligent decision which otherwise was done retrospective. Flexible, adaptive and wearable sensors are already part of sensor ecosystems. Sensor films which are about 60 microns in size today are transforming some areas of material processing and its applications in industries like printing, labelling etc. With nano materials on the anvil and the convergence with such sensor technologies the transformations would be much significant and sooner than one could think off. Harnessing sensor data thus will continue to penetrate every aspect of the manufacturing ecosystems and bring about significant value added changes that wasn’t possible until a couple of years ago.

• Self-learning Robots – Robot arms and emerging humanoids are here to stay. For instance, a firm in China has set up the first unmanned factory where everything is made by robotic arms thereby reducing dependence on manual workers. Everything in the factory is controlled by a computer which in turn controls robots, machines, equipment’s, transport trucks and automated warehouse equipment’s. The unmanned factory has 60 robot arms on 10 production lines that polish cell phone modules. Each production line has just three operators who check the lines and monitor them. The potential advantage here could be high productivity, lower costs, faster and safer environment. While all this looks nice and futuristic, the key question to ask is “would the worker of the future remain the same”? There have been instances where hazards between man and machines have made headlines, but I believe the trend is here to stay. Recently, I was chatting with a friend of mine who is a US based cardiac surgeon who was on trip to Japan to train few Japanese doctors advanced surgery skills. I asked “how come the Japanese” when they are experts in building all sorts of robots. Is robotics not the answer where humans could fail?.

  While we all can definitely choose to be concerned of jobs cuts, unemployment and maybe social unrest on account of robots replacing humans or learn how to co-exist with our own creations

  His response was “The surgeries we do is like making love, would you trust a robot to do that”. His response made me think deeper and evaluate the relevance of robotics. While we may not want them to do all of the work, there are some areas where humans would not trust a robot, however sophisticated they become. Interestingly its trust deficit that something might go worse is what makes them seem dangerous or not wanted however good they might be for our needs. “MIT Tech review eludes with certain facts. The province of Guangdong, the heartland of Chinese manufacturing, has already promised to invest $154 billion in installing robots. The founder of Foxconn, a company that employs vast armies of workers who make devices such as Apple’s iPhone, has said that his company will install more than a million robots in the next few years”. Simply put, the adoption of robots in manufacturing in an irreversible trend, especially when you know that robots can do a better job on repetitive tasks, will less fatigue. The very onset of disruptive digital technologies like deep learning combined with the power of robotics is making robots stand up on their own and learn new tasks without any external intervention. This will make them much smarter than they are today and will start using self-learning tools to manage uncertainty when exposed to unknown environments or circumstances. They are also being embedded with “Deep learning tools”, which uses large simulated neural networks, has already proven indispensable for training robots to understand the contents of images, video, and audio. Some companies now aim to use the approach to train robots how to see, grasp, and reason (see “A Supercharged System to Teach Robots New Tricks in Little Time”). While this is visible, what’s not visible is the big intelligent, cognitive, self-learning robot or algorithms that are behind every search engine, every social medial platform that has most information and data about what we do is what many of us should be worried today. 

  It would those who control and own intelligent algorithms and super compute facilities will be the lords of the economy.

  Image if there are self-learning robots that get access to all your information from what you search, travel, write, save and one fine day you see a robot walk at your doorstep with an interactive promotional demo of what you would interested in.... Sounds to be straight out of a sci-fi movie right?

• Digital Evolution, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence - It’s not only robots that do physical work better are replacing humans. Today machine learning powered by artificial intelligence are able to process enormous data in real time and help brings actions, insights faster and better than what skilled humans could have accomplished. The age of algorithms will displace a lot of intelligent work that was being done by humans. Definitely this would have a tangible impact in the knowledge economy in both developed and developing economies. The impact would probably be much significant for developing economies that are now catching up with education as a means to move their population into employment. Many of such developing economies could possibly miss the bus of employment with this new era digital revolution. A whole new class of unemployed resources would then be available for disposable in the economy. What concerns me most that the livelihood of many millions of middle class workers would be at stake specially in developing economies in such a scenario. This is definitely what governments should be wary about and strike a balance when developing policies. While this is a possibility, on the other sides, the positives as I see will be the rise of whole new breed of micro entrepreneur who now have endless possibilities of building a services economies leveraging robots, robotics, autonomous vehicles for simple applications like last mile connectivity, unmanned facility cleaning, scavenging waste, hazardous manual operations etc and at the same time creating newer employment opportunities in supervisory roles, robot operations, maintenance etc..

• The rise of the “Smart worker” – So what really does a smart worker look like. Would he/she/it look like and behave like a super hero from sci-fi movie? Would it be yet another robot? Well in reality they would be normal workers who would be much aware and trained on leveraging digital technologies. They would have much more processed information that could be used to make better decisions which wasn’t available at their behest in the past. They would have access to information on the fly to make decisions. They would be provided with insights on their fingertips which would aid in real time decision required during crisis, all this as and when they would want it. The worker would now be much smarter as the plants and factories get digitized. They would now have to better understanding of the whole manufacturing process and be aware of the interlinkages and thus would be get better at troubleshooting issues. The operators and technicians would not require to learn even a single a line of code. Most of the digital tools and applications that would use would be simple and easy to configure. The learning curve to adopt any digital technologies would be drastically low as compared to learning a new ERP, MES or PLM package. As such there would be a new workforce entering into the existing workforce who would be much equipped and aware of technological advancement. Today, in some facilities smart workers use all kinds of devices and tools to make their jobs simpler, faster and better. They could be equipped with smart jackets, smart helmets, smart watches, smart glasses, and smart shoes to make their job much safer, simpler and productive. A variety of low cost sensors which can stream real time data are now available which have made this possible. So a lot of things around the common worker are getting smarter by the day. This brings up the big questions – What skills are required for the future factory or plant worker? The expectations of plant and factory operator are now moved beyond just doing manual work. They are expected to take corrective steps on the fly with the information and intelligence available with them, with an objective of saving costs, doing more and better work in the same time. In turn they would have an overall improved, safe quality of work environment for themselves. While this catches up, age old labour laws, unions and ministries might have to revamp to keep up to the demands of growth.

• Industrial Augmented reality (AR) – This technology today has made inroads into the factory that was un-imaginable a few years ago. Augmented reality in simple terms enables superimposition of data, information, videos, voices, images and any information you want to stream real-time on the object of interest (like machines, equipment’s) in virtual-real industrial setting using hand held devices like tables, phones or even head gears. To illustrate, imagine a pump or motor that is making more noise than usual. In such scenarios to take proper and corrective decisions operators and supervisors can use AR techniques/applications without even touching the pump to see when it was last serviced and if there are an missing operating parameters which need to be fixed.. Today many manufacturing companies have adopted AR tools for maintenance and training activities to make on the stop assessments and decisions with their plants as well at their customer sites. Service information about parts replaced or to be replaced, failure logs, warranty and repair information are all captured on the fly and with a couple of clicks using tables, phones or monitoring touch screens. Factory workers are using AR application using their phone and tablets in day to day work like inspection, operations, maintenance etc. Experts believe AR will be ubiquitous in the next 10 years across industries just like mobile phones are today. Their applications have a distinct role to play in reducing time, do more or totally eliminate few tasks/steps.

• Smart factories - The factory of the future in my view will need to be highly adaptable to the demand. Variability to address diverse customer needs, low capex, less human intervention, least energy usage, high safety and sustainability will become building blocks of any state of the art manufacturing operations. Companies that would harness data, information and share insights about new ways of operations would have distinct edge over the conventional. The lead time to identify issues would shrink to a great extent. An example in the hi-tech manufacturing space is Foxconn which assembles iPhones for Apple. They would probably in the future use more robots and automation to fulfil nearly 70% of its assembly like work. Image the impact on this as this Taiwanese company employs 1 million workers in Mainland China. Image if such factories in the future had no air conditioning, no lights and all that is required by human workers to work in a conducive environment. It’s strange that all these years’ companies made factory environment safe and conducive for human workers, whereas in the future the investments in these would have limited value for most of them would be replaced by robots...! There are 1000’s of smart factories globally which are leveraging technology. Last couple of decades companies have adopted digital technologies to across life cycle of products, products ecosystems and supplier ecosystems..Today, there are touching all facets including workers. Mobility has already touched the factory workers for their personal needs. Now companies are explore how that can be extended for executing plant and factory related functions like maintenance, planning, scheduling, repairs, replenishment etc…The era of “Smart manufacturing” is on the rise.

• Reversal of past trends- Incidentally, Adidas, the German sportswear and equipment brand would be setting up production activities in 2017 in Germany after a long hiatus of 20 years, while their existing Asia factories will continue to use human workers. This factory covering just 4600 sq.ft will be manned by robots to produce the first 500 test pairs which are called as “SpeedFactory”. The reversal of trend while has been gradual is bound to pick pace sooner than one could anticipate. About 301 million pairs of shoes were made in 2015 by Adidas and chances are that within a few years Asia manufacturing plants would run out of growth. I will not be surprised if by 2020 all of the world’s best sportswear companies would make products using robots. This trend is bound to move into for instance into garment manufacturing, special chemical processing and all fields where humans are employed and where robots could be a better option.

• Economic adoption - All this looks fancy to generalise, but the fact of the matter is that it’s on it way and will catch up provided it makes economic sense to companies. The possibility of use of robots and automation is more where the nature of work is hazardous for humans. The most relevant would be forging, casting, chemical processing, nuclear facilities, deep sea diving for research, hazardous material waste movement and collection etc where injury and mortality rates are highest as potential hot spots for transformation. The challenge however is cost, security and potential resistance from unions. Even today in many countries labour cost is much lower than the cost of owning and maintaining a robot. Unless it becomes economic sense the adoption of robots would continue to remain slower in markets where cost of labour is relatively lower. I call this “economic adoption”. The trend to become generic will have to be economical especially in developing countries where the relevance is much higher.

21st Century transformations impacting manufacturing stakeholders

While it may sound clichéd every enterprise these days questions not only what more they can do with their existing business but also are curious to know and find out if they would be in business 10 years down the line. Over years my conversations with CXO’s across diverse industries, it appears to be one of the most important question that they want to ask themselves and for their business leaders. Following this their next question is – “Is our competitor the traditional one or new breed player? Do we really try to know them or continue our business as usual”. In context of these below are some of the underlying trends that have been there for a while and some emerging as we speak. The seamless confluence of these trends is disrupting manufacturing and reshaping it. A plethora of micro trends are converging to give shape to a macro trend. Take for example, consumerism. It has changed how new breed companies reach out to their customers and build products.

1. Consumerism - Traditionally all product ideas were linear within four walls of a R&D and Marketing function with a little bit of pilot testing. Today it starts with the consumer setting the expectations and companies are figuring out how to build one virtually. Direct consumer connect is increasingly seen as a big differentiator. The nature of consumerism is that customers want a unique product that meets their asks – be it colour, size, shape, functionality, performance, experience and not the least price and quality. Beyond this they want it just in time, easily replaceable, serviceable and with good enough warranty. The wants are endless and companies are struggling to find a balance on what is possible and what is not within the boundaries of their business. Companies have realized that if don’t know what customers want and go with they believe would work for customers, chances are that they would not be in business for long. This is especially true in businesses where the barrier of entry for newcomers is very less. Involving existing and potential customers in the process of ideation and sourcing ideas from them is an increasing phenomenon. Crowdsourcing of ideas and investments is giving birth to a whole new breed of start-ups, which are blurring the barriers of entry for established players.
2. Automation – Customers dynamics is driving pressure on companies R&D and production functions to cater to consumer variability. Literally ever idea is being virtually simulated including simulating potentially adoption by customers before investing in capital and operations. New age technologies around operational technologies are being adopted to manage variability and time to market constraints maintaining cost and quality. Most of the automation is occurring on the lines (material, assembly, part movements, packaging, logistics, procurement etc) as well around workflows which are being completely digitised. ERP, PLM, MES, Engineering, Machine and Sensor data collection and orchestrations of operations are continuously being automated. The shop floor to top floor information exchange is being made seamless. Every employee in the factory or plant now has a much broader view of the operations and hence is being empowered to make better and faster decisions. Robots and vision systems powered by machine learning are driving autonomy to a great extent especially in areas where the tasks are repetitive. The factory today is simulated virtually even before it is being commissioned. The digital twin of the real facility is enabling faster execution as the building blocks and their interactions are now being captured across the life cycle of the factory or plant.
3. Democratization of Technology – Technology being available at the disposal of common man is leading towards democratization. Today technology is more open, accessible and affordable than before. One such technology that has moved out of R&D functions is 3D printing which is now available easily as service at very low price points which was not thought of affordable a few years ago. Nano materials and nano technologies are paving the way for Nano manufacturing which would completely disrupt some of the traditional manufacturing practices. While this is yet to get into real time adoption the trend would help one build parts bottom up building and joining atom by atom. However there have been concerns about use of Nano particles (owing to their extremely low size) and also huge R&D and production investments in coming up with the first gen nano structures for safe commercial use. The variable customer demands are paving the way for mass customization at lower costs. This would require a different setup of machines, work Centre’s and planning. Industry 4.0 is leading the way towards mass customization and agile manufacturing. Companies like Siemens and Bosch have made significant progress in building manufacturing systems that meet expectations of mass customisation.
4. Digitization of the manufacturing value chain – Digitization today is not limited to products, processes and systems. Every stakeholder involved in the value chain is part of the ecosystem now. Each and every stakeholder in the manufacturing ecosystem is being digitized be it : consumers, customers, partners, distributors, suppliers, regulatory bodies, assets and employees.

   The big systematic change that is occurring is the evolution of “Intelligent Autonomous systems” which are now driving predictability, interoperability and standardization of machine to machine interactions towards a state of autonomy. Industry 4.0 (Industrie 4.0) to a great extent is attempting to achieve this. PLM, MES and Automations systems are being seamlessly integrated to share data and rich information over the entire life cycle of the product, machine and operations. Artificial intelligence, IT-OT convergence, analytics with the fabric of API’s is enabling this trend to a large extent.

5. Smart services – Most companies are at the corner stone in reinventing themselves to really understand what and how to start monetizing some of the data they have captured about customers for ages. Smart services are paving this trend where companies are offering value added services harnessing the data available with them or data that they could pull from their products in the near future to offer better product experiences. This service, usage and operational information about their products are a goldmine for many companies. Some companies have already moving into the services space along with the products. Products no longer are their core differentiation. Services on top of products and the intelligence that helps end customers is an opportunity that most OEM’s are focusing on harnessing in some form or other. For example welding equipment’s are sold as one time unit sales whereas electrodes are consumables which are required for the life of the equipment. If equipment manufacturers like them have better understand of how their equipment’s are used and when and how much of consumables would be required and provide the replenishment of the consumables as a service it would ease a lot of operational and administrative pressures on organisations. This would hold true for office equipment manufactures like printers, plotters etc. There lies a whole new untapped value beyond selling products by OEM’s, that if serviced appropriately, would benefits companies as well as end consumers.

Manufacturing Innovation in practice.

While robots are doing what humans have done for centuries, the need for manufacturing would be reduced is some areas. For example 3D printing is making some processes obsolete in the manufacturing process. In fact some manufactured parts and their associated tooling is now completely replaced by 3D printed parts. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation would have a 3D printer at to home to make parts and products as per their wish. This is happening across industries and will definitely be a passing phase and newer “consumer centric” technologies would emerge that would shape the future of manufacturing. The emergence of internet of things (IoT), Digital manufacturing, Industrie 4.0 initiatives and how it is shaping the business is interesting. It’s the ear of cognitive manufacturing where self-contained systems can plan their operations based on unique customer demands. These marquee technologies towards are turning points which are making organisations take a fresh look at their business strategy. It is no longer what the company wants to do..It is all about what their customer’s wants and needs are and how to keep them happy and engaged over the life of the products and services. 

In the beginning of this article I touched upon the history of manufacturing, currents trends and transformations that are impacting the industry. In the below sections I have tried to simplify some of these turning points.

Internet of Things - In simple “Internet of Things / Internet of Everything” is a network of systems (internal or external) that includes people, infrastructure, machines, products, instruments, devices, sensors – basically, every “thing” that can create stimuli and which could measure, sense, communicate with each other thereby enabling the system to be monitored, analyzed , automated, controlled, and eventually make it autonomous. As a resultant the system would be responding to the stimuli to drive actions/deliver individual experiences/ business outcomes with least human intervention.

The picture above illustrates one way of defining IoT.

It is key is to understand that each system would possibly have its own sub-system, in turn having its own sub-sub system, and so on, going further down to the most individual element/unit, until it ends at a node (end point physical thing) or an edge device that would behave like a node in a typical network system.

 Industry 4.0 (Industrie 4.0) - Industry 4.0 is a collective term that denotes the comprehensive transformations the whole sphere of industrial production/manufacturing could achieve through merging of digital technology, automation & controls, networks & connectivity, sensors & devices, data & analytics and any cyber physical system across the manufacturing ecosystem. Today Industry 4.0 is seen as the 4th Industrial revolution. However it is simply an evolution due to the onset of interconnectedness between cyber and physical systems.

 The term Industry 4.0 originated in Germany, but the concept largely overlaps across multiple European countries, as labelled as

• Smart factories
• Industrial Internet of Things
• Smart Industry
• Advanced Manufacturing

 Origination and adoption of Industrie 4.0

• Initiative launched in 2011 by German government to increase competitiveness of German manufacturing companies as compared to rest of the world.
• Being adopted by rest of Europe to produce quality products at same or lesser cost for least production quantities.
• Helps to transform OEE, Capacity utilization to meet unit demand quantities, increasing opportunities for newer value steams and business models that did not exist earlier.

Cognitive Manufacturing – This technology encompasses the use of cognitive agents (usually intelligence controllers, software, robots, natural language processing engines etc.) beyond merely making factory ecosystem smart. In cognitive manufacturing the intelligence of “system and systems” is retained and resides within the system of “thing” which is part of the system and works in tandem to enable autonomous operations leverage cognitive reasoning. Such systems monitor and evaluate changes in the production systems in real time and know how to respond to the changes (including dynamic ones). They adapt to the change to maintain the production or manufacturing process within the set threshold limits or targets which are evaluated on an ongoing basis. This ensures optimal performance of the manufacturing process in line with real time operations conditions ensuring maximum throughput at an optimum cost. This is achieved by orchestrating multiple distributed intelligence agents that are deployed in the manufacturing system at different level. For example, they could be multiple cognitive agents which could be deployed at the following levels.

• At the factory level
• At the manufacturing execution system level
• At the machine or production system level, supply chain level etc

 While such technologies are at the fore front of advanced manufacturing systems, companies are seeing this as a way to move away from traditional systems. This is bringing a significant change in how suppliers and OEM’s of manufacturing systems are looking at their business today. While traditional systems will continue to exist what would differentiate from others is the ability of such OEM’s/suppliers to bring cutting edge technologies in their product and system solutions. The ability of such OEM’s is the probably the most influencing factors towards Industrie 4.0 journeys. They would truly enable the realization of “Intelligent and autonomous cyber physical systems’ in true sense.

Going Beyond Digital - Finally, it would be unfair to say that all of this constitutes the future of what manufacturing beholds. Self-healing materials and a host of other associated data, connectivity, and natural language processing technologies are bound to disrupt how materials have been shaped, formed and produced into finished products in traditional manufacturing environments. We are probably at a corner stone of scientific revolution where materials know how and ability to build products bottoms up would pave the way to a whole new manufacturing world.

Happy reading and stay tuned. Views and comments welcome!