Manufacturers are busy either exploring or deploying AR, IoT sensors, and other smart engineering technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Rapid prototyping, married with augmented reality technologies, is starting to help manufacturing companies significantly reduce the time it takes to bring their products to market. According to Alfred Pargfrieder, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise smart engineering consultant, […]
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For front-line managers who are responsible for bringing digital transformation to the industrial edge, there are often difficulties with system deployment and day-to-day operations to contend with. At an auto plant or electronics factory, there might be hundreds of systems using distinct Operational Technology (OT) devices like PLCs or DCUs to monitor and control manufacturing processes. […]
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The problems described above are tackled by companies from various industries, from 3D printing to electronics, but also from various angles in their attempt to improve various portions of the value chain. However, this siloed innovation approach leads to duplication of work where there is a very scarce talent pool for the community to draw […]
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Today, the term Digital Twin is ubiquitous. Four years ago, I had my first personal contact with this concept. I attended the VDI conference “Big Data in Manufacturing”, where a General Electric’s (GE) manager presented the well-known example of the transformation of GE’s business model in the aircraft turbine market. GE equips its turbines with […]
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The movement towards Industrie 4.0 leads to a higher software penetration on the shop floor. Companies must sit behind the steering wheel if they do not want to run into trouble. A suitable software architecture is the basis for a successful Industrie 4.0 journey. As shown in this article, manufacturers have to adapt to new […]
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The economy has always had a pivotal role inside societies that have evolved over centuries. In recent decades, we witnessed several industrial revolutions that have shaped our civilization [1]. One of the best examples of the role played by manufacturing in our society is the introduction of the assembly line by Henry Ford in 1913. […]
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IIoT has often been presented as a cost-saving mechanism or a means to make factories more productive. It is all that, of course. But the benefits of IoT don’t end there since they allow for the “servitization” of products. Products used to be complete once they left the factory floor. A car, a tractor or […]
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In the past, if you wanted to know how a machine was performing on a shop floor, you would have had to put pencil to paper and note the output, the error rate, the quality, all manually. You would have to look at the quality of the inputs and the available supply of the raw […]
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For manufacturers, managing the supply chain from beginning to end has been like traveling two superhighways interrupted by a long stretch of dirt road. Manufacturers have benefited from increasingly powerful tools for demand planning and logistics management – the first and last parts of their supply chains – but tracking the performance of manufacturing production […]
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Edge computing has many beenefits; it means faster response times, increased reliability and security. A lot has been said about how the Internet of Things ( IoT ) is revolutionizing the manufacturing world. Many studies have already predicted more than 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020. It is also expected over 1.44 billion data […]
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The convergence of Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) systems may help manufacturers embrace new service offerings using web-based business models. Many years ago one of my distributor partners took me to do an automation demo for a very large industrial OEM. Afterward we went into a stockroom, where she noted on a clipboard […]
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Two lawyers walk into a smart manufacturing conference. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, right? Well, no, actually, it was the reality last month when lawyers Matt Pollins, partner and head of commercial/TMT at legal firm CMS Singapore, and Wong Hong Boon, manufacturing and supply chain legal counsel at 3M Singapore, joined a […]
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