“Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.”
– James Dyson
1. Return on Investment in Connected Factories
Leverage: the unsung value of connected factories. Most of the industry recognizes the immediate value in connecting manufacturing technologies – at least the manufacturers who have been awake for the past five years or so do. These data systems provide significant value down the road, and as more systems are connected, their impact on the enterprise also grows.
2. Rinse and Repeat for Material Design?
Nope. Designing and developing materials has always been a very long process. Powering integrated computational materials engineering with machine learning will vastly accelerate the process. What does this mean? Plan on machining or welding 30 different variations of the “same” part as materials will be designed for more narrow-use cases.
3. The Intersection of Technology, Art, and Amazing Leaders
It is not often I like 3D printing for art. This is my one exception. The Smithsonian printed 120 life-sized statues of women role models in science, technology, engineering, and math. To name-drop, here are two examples: “Jessica Esquivel, one of only 150 black American women with a physics doctorate, and Karina Popovich, a student who 3D printed more than 82,000 pieces of PPE for health workers during the early stages of the pandemic when such equipment was in especially short supply.”
4. Cybersecurity Goes in All Directions
Cybersecurity is often seen as a one-way security measure. In reality, the threats to a manufacturing enterprise are from all directions. As factories become more connected, the direction of communication from operation technologies will vary from data systems and other equipment.
5. Edge Computing
There is a lot of discussion on where data analysis occurs. For most environments, cloud-based computation makes sense. What happens if I need to reduce latency or reduce the cost of data storage? Edge computing is always the answer for everything. OK, maybe not everything.
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