The warning about the vulnerability of the aerospace and defense industry’s supply chain came buried in the pages of a report issued by the consulting firm EY two years before the COVID-19 outbreak became a full-blown global crisis.
Improvements in manufacturing management software, robotics, additive manufacturing and thermal controls are making small batch sizes more cost effective—even for smaller shops. Manufacturing plants are able to reduce inventory, improve throughput and reduce demands on human operators.
We no longer need to accept that it takes a decade to create and make a safe and effective vaccine—thanks in part to smart manufacturing.
COVID-19 revealed some deep-rooted shortcomings in our approach to manufacturing and to supply chain design in the U.S. Well beyond the immediate and urgent need for PPE, we saw dramatic swings in both supply and demand for almost everything bought and sold here.
Listen to this Smart Manufacturing magazine cover story: In the thick of the ‘herculean’ vaccine push. Moderna is among the companies able to tackle the most urgent of matters precisely because of their digital strength.
Until 2017, Schneider Electric faced a factory bottleneck at its breaker box plant in Lexington, Kentucky. When the automation cell that welded the boxes went down, all production could be forced to stop.
EOS said it has partnered with Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station to provide a professional development program in the field of industrial 3D printing.
Digital manufacturing—industrial 3D printing in particular—has catalyzed world-changing ideas since its inception. This year, however, the technology proved invaluable, moving at warp-speed in the face of unprecedented challenges when the world was overtaken by a fast-spreading virus.
The service bureaus that grew in lockstep with 3D printing’s early rise in popularity have largely evolved into one-stop shops for a variety of machined, fabricated, plastic-injection molded, and of course 3D-printed parts.
To grow in today’s manufacturing world, shops need to consolidate operations, automate, increase efficiency, capture and analyze data and more, in order to fully leverage opportunities in thriving industries, such as aerospace.
