Faurecia decided it needed to get serious about Industry 4.0 fast. To show the way, the French automotive supplier built a $64 million factory in Columbus, IN.
It’s no secret that Additive Manufacturing (AM), while often regarded as “emerging” technology, has secured its place in the manufacturing arena. There is good reason for this: AM offers a lure of solutions to previously impossible-to-solve design and manufacturing challenges.
There is a lot of noise around the issue of robotics and manufacturing jobs, some of it appearing in national business magazines like Forbes and Fortune, and one of the ways to quiet the voices claiming that automation kills jobs is to review the last seven years and to point to real-life examples of robotics applications keeping companies competitive, Association for Advancing Automation (A3) President Jeff Burnstein said today here at the Automate conference.
David Küstner and Daniel Erdelmeier wrote their theses at Lufthansa Technik. Now, their firm, Synergeticon, provides digital assistance to factory workers—and its small but growing staff counts among its customers Lufthansa Technik and its partner Airbus, Küstner said in a group interview with British and American tech writers visiting ZAL (Zentrum für Angewandte Luftfahrtforschung) TechCenter for applied aviation research here yesterday.
You have heard it before, today’s manufactured products are becoming ever more complicated. As computers and microcontrollers get ever cheaper and more powerful they have become more enticing for product engineers to use and incorporate. This means the intellectual property in the embedded software has grown increasingly in value – possibly exponentially.
The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has fallen to 20 years from more than 60 years in 1960. The power and influence of technology will increase as much in the next 18 months as it has in the last 30 years.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has elements of the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk.
It’s probably not a bad idea for smaller and mid-sized manufacturers (SMMs) to adopt an “us against them” attitude as they become aware of the prevalence of cyber-attacks in the digital age of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0.
The U.S. needs to build a national infrastructure in engineering and manufacturing R&D that parallels its scientific infrastructure. While it makes all the sense in the world, it is not happening.
Smart sensors, already an integral feature of many manufacturing plants that are integrating IT and OT, are now making their way into the supply chain where they monitor reliability and shipping conditions, improve predictive maintenance and make just-in-time delivery (the innovation from the 1980s) easier.