SMART MANUFACTURING Merger of cyber, physical manufacturing worlds improves costs, quality, safety and customization.


Modern Times circa 2016: Achieving unprecedented control at all levels


Ilene Wolff Contributing Editor


I


f Charlie Chaplin were to update Modern Times, the 1936 movie where an assembly line’s gears grab and drag his Tramp character into the machine’s inner workings, he’d have to call for a rewrite—be- cause the digital world that is revolutionizing man- ufacturing today would avoid such catastrophes.


Increasingly, modern factories merge the real and the virtual, and if predictions from manufacturing visionaries continue to materialize, the two worlds promise to become even more intertwined in the factory of tomorrow. While industrial giants like GE, with its Brilliant Factory,


and Lockheed Martin, which is assembling a “digital tap- estry,” are leading the way in the Fourth Industrial Revolu- tion, small and medium-size manufacturers must incor- porate the virtual world into their factories for American Industry to remain competitive. There’s a lot at stake: While 17% of US manufacturing


businesses have receipts of $25 million or more, accord- ing to Census Bureau data, most manufacturers are much smaller: 21% have revenues between $2.5 million and $24.9 million; 26.5% have receipts between $500,000 and $2.4 million, and 35% of manufacturers bring in less than $500,000 a year. These majority small- and medium-size factory own-


ers may question how they can absorb the expense and acquire the know-how to go digital. The encouraging news is that government, academia, larger manufactur- ers that depend on the smaller suppliers and savvy digi- tal entrepreneurs are collaborating to make the newer technology accessible. One of those savvy digital entrepreneurs borrowed an


idea from Uber and Airbnb and applied it to contract man- ufacturing. The entrepreneur, Drura Parrish, established


MakeTime (Lexington, KY), an online marketplace that brings the sharing economy to manufacturing through the sale and purchase of machine time by the hour in shops with excess capacity. The benefits of smart machines, smart factories and smart


manufacturing go far beyond efficiency, quality and cost savings, too. They hold the promise of enabling truly sustain- able, efficient and custom manufacturing. Once networked to a larger system, smart manufacturing holds the potential to reshape supply chains in ways similar to how the digital revolution has transformed banking, personal transportation, travel accommodations, retailing and other sectors. “We’re really at the beginning of this digital revolution”


in manufacturing, said Karen Kerr, senior managing direc- tor of GE Ventures. Kerr told an audience at FABTECH 2015 how GE is


reshaping its own manufacturing facilities, and others, by opening its Predix software to app developers. Predix is used universally in GE’s Brilliant Factory. Also in 2015, GE launched the Brilliant Manufacturing


Suite at its Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco to showcase how machines and digital technology can merge. Globally, the digital future for manufacturing is be-


coming reality. “It’s going to touch everybody,” said Dean Bartles,


executive director of the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute in Chicago. DMDII is a federally funded program that encourages factories to increase efficiency and cost-competitiveness by employing digital practices. Bartles, who is also president of SME, predicts that in


the next five to 15 years, manufacturers will need to be digitally connected in order to secure contracts from major OEMs in industries such as aerospace and defense.


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Spring 2016


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