The Northeastern United States is the birthplace of American manufacturing and continues to be a center for high-tech innovation today. Continuing that heritage of advanced manufacturing is the premier Northeast manufacturing trade show, EASTEC 2023, held in West Springfield, Mass., May 16-18. The event is co-sponsored by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME).
EASTEC attendees can immerse themselves in innovations and knowledge to achieve higher levels of efficiency and profitability. There are continual opportunities to explore advanced manufacturing technologies, discover hundreds of suppliers, learn from industry experts, and network with other professionals.
The show features five buildings with more than 700 exhibitors demonstrating the latest equipment and processes in additive manufacturing, robotics, machining, cutting tools and accessories, CNC controls, and smart manufacturing. EASTEC offers solutions for manufacturing industries that include aircraft and aerospace, defense, medical devices, and many more.
Networking receptions every day provide a unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with suppliers and partners to renew business relationships and form new ones. Education sessions will include keynote addresses and panel discussions with industry leaders, as well as Knowledge Bars staffed with experts who are eager to help address questions and challenges.
Enabling Automated Reasoning
Keynote speaker Michael Carroll, Vice President of Innovation & Transformation at Georgia Pacific, will present The Three Domains of Automation and How They Affect Your Transformation Journey. While automation is considered a modern solution for repetitive and predictive tasks, there’s a third dimension of automation that can be applied to almost any manufacturing or business process.
Carroll will discuss the development of a targeted business use of collective intelligence, a combination of subject matter expert knowledge of processes and functions, combined with the analytics of artificial intelligence. This capability helps guide workers through their tasks, anticipates next steps, provides educational resources for those tasks, and even recommends training for future jobs. A fully automated system continually monitors work progress and keeps operations optimally efficient. This has become especially important in a drought of skilled laborers.
“Due to the loss of knowledge from retirements, a new employee coming into a job that’s a little complicated doesn’t have the process knowledge that the previous person had,” Carroll says. “An automated system captures data points as well as actual expert knowledge along the entire manufacturing process to help employees make decisions and understand why those decisions are being made. It’s like having a digital work companion because they’re learning and generating value faster, and the system validates that they’ve made the right decisions.”
EASTEC 2023 is part of a Manufacturing Technology Series sponsored by AMT and SME that includes SOUTHTEC, WESTEC, and HOUSTEX. These regional events draw together key decision makers, major tool and technology suppliers, and thought leaders from across a broad spectrum of manufacturing disciplines.
For more details about EASTEC and to register to attend, visit easteconline.com.
