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Rod Anthony is the president of Anthony Screw Products Ltd., Burlington, Ontario, Canada. He has more than 25 years of experience working in every position in his plant’s manufacturing process.

Maybe your company specializes in aerospace or medical components, and you need to produce complex geometries in metals too tough to cut via conventional machining methods.

There’s nothing mysterious about the need for calibration. As Michael Wilm, business manager for calibration products, Renishaw Inc., West Dundee, Illinois, put it: “When you get gas for your car, you count on the pump being calibrated. That’s why we calibrate machine tools. If you don’t calibrate a machine tool you have no idea it’s going to give you reliable service for manufacturing your product.”

One of the foundational aspects of Industry 4.0 protocols is the creation of electronic “digital twin” models of product data and production processes. This includes an exact replica of all machine tools, including complex work envelopes showing the particular spindles, fixtures, and cutting tools.

If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of Industry 4.0, and perhaps a bit sheepish about your lack of progress, you’ve got good company.

If you look at all the companies that were on the Fortune 500 list in 1990, “a very large percentage of them are not there anymore,” David Brousell, executive director of the Manufacturing Leadership Council, told people attending his talk on “Manufacturing 4.0” at Oracle’s recent Modern Business Experience conference.

Connected manufacturing and digitization technologies are spurring many of the major innovations in CNC machine controls that help machine shops cut metal and create parts as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Sensors are making their way deeper into process manufacturing where they monitor PH levels in vinegar, ensure towering bins of sugar aren’t overfilled and measure humidity in bakeries. Sensors are even helping power better mousetraps.

Cloud computing helps any kind of manufacturing with cybersecurity, efficiency, on-call scalability, and Industry 4.0. But for medical manufacturers, cloud computing brings additional critical benefits.

If “automation” is the constant drone you hear from practically everyone in metalworking these days, job shop owners might be the only people yelling “No!” Or at least “Wait!” How, they ask, can you cost-effectively automate low-volume, high-mix parts? Yet it’s not only doable but probably necessary.