As manufacturers aim to become increasingly nimble in the marketplace,distributed manufacturing—making parts or finished products at or near the location where they will be used instead of at a central factory—is emerging as a way to advance a faster, more flexible and cheaper supply chain.

Hexagon's Manufacturing Intelligence division announced today it will host HxGN LIVE Smart Manufacturing Detroit 2020, to be held May 19-20. The digital solutions conference will be held at Hexagon’s newest U.S. facility and regional cornerstone in Novi, Mich.

As manufacturers continue to see demand for tighter tolerances and less waste, new solutions are needed to solve challenges. Dave O’Neil, Vice President of SME Media, sits down with Patrick Cratty, Assistant Product Manager and Richard Bevers, Southern District Manager for BIG Kaiser Precision Tooling, to talk about new technology and products. Hitting upon how digital technology and advanced workholding designs are improving machining and eliminating persistent manufacturing issues.

As manufacturing marches forward into the digital era, a growing ecosystem of standards is laying the foundation for a new generation of data management.

Today, an iPhone has more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that took Neil Armstrong to the moon in Apollo 11 – and the size and capabilities of today’s computer boards are making an even more monumental change in how we manufacture. All this technology gives manufacturers the capability to operate, as stated in The Six Million Dollar Man, “better, stronger, faster.” Christoph Berlin, Partner Program Manager at Microsoft sat down with Associate Editor Chris Mahar to talk about smart manufacturing and Microsoft’s Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) vision.

The institutes that make up Manufacturing USA need to move at the speed of business, considering that the endeavor represents the U.S. government’s biggest investment in the digitization of manufacturing to date.