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COVID-19 has taught manufacturers a valuable lesson: when humans fall ill, machine tools and equipment sit idle. Granted, they already knew it, just as they knew that employees take lunch breaks and vacations, arrive late because their car won’t start, and go work at the shop down the street for fifty cents more an hour.

Manufacturing engineers, information technologists, and “smart” robots in flexible manufacturing cells are working ever more closely in manufacturing companies around the world.

Manufacturing is moving towards high-mix production different products in very small lots. Advanced robotics may be needed to get there.

Over the past decade, IMTS has been a good indicator of the changing status of additive manufacturing. The show’s floor space devoted to 3D printing expanded from 2014 to 2018, reaching pavilion status at the most recent show. It had been scheduled to grow even more at IMTS 2020 before the show’s cancellation.

Controls help make modern manufacturing go. Controls help shop floor employees monitor Industry 4.0 technology. Controls also boost productivity on the shop floor. Technology companies are highlighting improvements designed to maintain the forward momentum of advanced technology.

3D printing is as much about the software as it is about the unique technology of the printers, and a well-designed platform brings the power of agile software engineering to the world of industrial manufacturing.

Ford Motor Co. is leasing four-legged robots from Boston Dynamics as part of a program to reduce cost and boost efficiency.

As in other industries, U.S. forming and fabricating companies are experiencing a critical shortage of skilled labor. In this SME Media podcast, Alan Rooks, Editor in Chief of Manufacturing Engineering magazine, talks with Robert Tessier, National Director of Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Airgas about the skills gap in the forming and fabricating industry; changes needed in the education system to fill the need for skilled labor; how automation factors into efforts to reduce the skills gap; and efforts at Airgas to develop workers for manufacturing operations, including a special program for military veterans.

Manufacturing Engineering last covered the pluses and minuses of combining additive and subtractive machining in detail in July 2017.

FANUC was named a GM Supplier of the Year by General Motors during a virtual ceremony honoring the recipients of the company’s 28th annual Supplier of the Year awards on June 24.