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.
Nobody knows just yet how the auto industry will adopt 3D printing. But Desktop Metal Inc. (Burlington, MA) is in a better position than most to make an educated guess.
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Industry 4.0, Automation and 3D printing are three of the hottest topics in manufacturing, and this podcast targets all three! Listen in as Alan Rooks, Editor in Chief of Manufacturing Engineering magazine, talks with Steve Fruehe, pre-sales solutions consultant, and Zach Gray, strategic business developer for Siemens about the basics of digitalization; approaches to gathering and storing the required data; and how app development figures into the equation.
At a grand opening ceremony on Nov. 5, Fives DyAG Corp. (Smart Automation Solutions Division) celebrated the inauguration of its new center of competency for controls engineering in Greenville, South Carolina.