Technology has taken centerstage in today’s digital economy—and for good reason. As geographical boundaries dissipate, it is often an organization’s ability to effectively embrace and strategically leverage manufacturing technology that ultimate defines the organization’s ability innovate or even survive.
To complicate the issue, even though manufacturing technology has the potential to serve as a key differentiator, investments in emerging technologies are never a sure thing. And, betting on the wrong technology or doing so at the wrong time can prove costly.
In this virtual roundtable, we asked a few world-renowned futurists to provide their insights into which technologies possess the staying power to fuel today’s manufacturers into the winner’s circle tomorrow.
IW: Big picture, how do you see technology changing manufacturing in years to come?
Rohit Talwar: We will see major shifts as a range of exponentially advancing smart technologies come into play. from adaptive robots to 3D and 4D printing the landscape will be transformed. These will also allow small footprint solutions for manufacturing to spread—3D printed cars being produced in every city as old retail and office outlets are repurposed as clean multipurpose flexible factories doing small batch runs of everything from 3D printed vehicles to on demand mass customized fashion sold via the web.
Joyce Gioia: Robots like Baxter will continue to transform the production landscape, but that is only the beginning of the way that technology will affect the industries in the years to come. Using Big Data, manufacturers will become better at targeting their prospects, retaining their talent, and managing their supply chains to drive significantly more bottom-line profit. Physically, autonomous vehicles will roam our warehouses picking and packing orders for delivery.
Trond Arne Undheim: I’m a contrarian on this question. I don’t think technology is at the heart of manufacturing in years to come. Emerging technologies are largely known, and include AI, robotics, IoT, sensors, microlocation tech, wearables, micro/nanotech and Factory App platforms stitching them together.
What drives change is what I call the Four Forces of Disruption: tech, policy, business models and social dynamics. Among those, the function of tech is the most trivial and well known. What will matter more is social dynamics, for instance worker response—both in terms of skills and emotional readiness. How long will it take to develop constructive man/machine relationships? How soon will industrial robots be out of their cages? Secondly, how will the policy/regulatory environment evolve? Will policy makers take a proactive or reactive approach in major economies like China, USA and Europe? This is more a question of social and regulatory confidence in new technology than in incremental advances in industrial safety.
If workers learn to collaborate with robots, our factories could be revamped over the next decade. If not, it will take much longer, despite tech advances. Advancing manufacturing is largely a question of education and exposure. Are we willing to put in place adequate training programs? Are we willing to increase risks of significant injury due to such experimentation? Will standardization move at a good pace or will proprietary platforms (e.g. robotics) slow progress? Interoperability is the key to the integration of separate tech advancements that have evolved in this field over the past decade, which was likely more revolutionary than the next decade will be.
IW: Which specific technologies do you see having the biggest impact on manufacturing?
Talwar: Data, robotics and AI will underpin everything—allowing rapid real time changes in production to reflect minute by minute demand patterns. Blockchain will transform the way we protect customer information, patents and cash flows, further enhancing the shift to local manufacture and direct to factory ordering. The advent of sensors on or in everything—bringing to life the IoT will either drown us in data or provide an incredible wealth of insight to control everything from post code by post code analysis of demand patterns through to predictive maintenance—conducted by fully autonomous and self-replicating robot technicians that can scale up their numbers on demand.
AR/VR will transform maintenance and installation—guiding engineers through equipment set up and repair with step by step visual and multi-sensory guidance. Wearables will allow us to track health and safety issues, worker performance, and security risks. If the tech picks up that you are not doing a task well, it can ensure that you are provided instant guidance by a personal tutor with video support.
Gioia: Because of the physical nature of manufacturing, advancing robotics will have the greatest impact on the industry. However, Augmented Reality will be increasingly used in training and Wearables will be combined with Robotics to provide controllers for the machines.
Undheim: According to research carried out by Yegii, Inc., the tech insight platform, there are currently 25 meta-technologies shaping the world of tomorrow. Among those, additive manufacturing, IIoT, nanotech and robotics stand out as catalysts in the near term. AR will be important, too, but due to the computational complexity, few working and scalable prototypes/poor rollout and lack of worker/cultural readiness, AR’s full impact will likely only be felt towards the latter part of the decade. As for AI, let me leave that off the table, for now, since we only have machine learning for now. True generalized AI, the monster people fear would truly re-shape manufacturing (and everything else) but is not a worry I have for the decade we just entered, since tech is far from ready. Even manufacturing AI (e.g. machines that run all decision making) is so complex that it cannot be contemplated yet.
However, the biggest impact will be felt by the integration of a myriad of technologies which are already very advanced but currently only exist in an embryonic stage of adoption in actual factories and industry settings, such as independent collaborative robots, micro-location technology (crucial both for safety and accuracy of production), inexpensive sensor technology (without which we cannot see wide adoption), as well as factory app platforms.
Three highly impactful efforts that help with integration and deployment include:
· The emerging MIT startup Tulip, which enables factory workers to continue their regular workflow yet have digital sensors record, enhance, and support their work through analytics.
· Standards bodies such as NIST’s Robotic Systems Interoperability and Integration initiative, which, if successful, will enable us to leapfrog the proprietary era of computing that blocked the software industry for two decades. Other governmental standards bodies as well as private consortia are also doing relevant work.
· The MIT.nano Consortium and other academe/industry consortia on micro/nanotech (at The Max Planck Society, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Caltech, Stanford, Tsinghua, Cornell, UNM, Georgia Tech, Cambridge University, Imperial College etc.) as applied towards advancing material technologies for manufacturing.
It’s not the science or technology we are waiting for, but our understanding and implementation of their potential in a responsible manner in industry and society.
IW: What do you see as the biggest misconceptions people have about these emerging technologies?
Gioia: People’s biggest misconceptions about these emerging technologies are that we can adopt the wide usage of these technologies with our current workforce. In fact, we will need people with significantly greater skills and abilities to ensure that productivity is optimized.
Talwar: There's a real lack of understanding of how fast they are evolving and how deeply they are already penetrating every sector—not just manufacturing. We need to raise out curiosity and digital literacy to understand how they work, their capabilities, and their implications. This will help avoid the hundreds of billions of dollars that are wasted every year on failed technology automation initiatives.
Undheim: It is easy to predict things in the (abstract) future by projecting trends or imagining prototypes could be scaled up, but the future typically changes much slower than it looks to the futurist, technologist or startup founder, who are all focused on, and thrive on, opportunity and change. We may have more time to contemplate these emerging changes that we all realize, which is good. We need it.
IW: Any technologies with the potential to be difference makers that manufacturers are missing out on or undervaluing?
Gioia: Few manufacturers that I know of are using AR and VR to their full value. These technologies can not only help with training but also in the optimum use of space. Manufacturers must not overlook the importance of user interfaces and experiences in making decisions to adopt new technologies. It is the quality of the experience that will determine the level of engagement and the engagement that will drive profit. Bottom line: if the employee experience with the new technology is not positive, it is a recipe for problems and possible disaster.
Talwar: Today: AI already has transformative potential from product design and testing through to scheduling, predictive maintenance and failure analysis.
Next five years: Quantum computing could put us into a whole new domain of possibility in terms of the computing power and flexibility that could be delivered to even then smallest of factories.
Next ten years: 4D printing will enable the manufacturing of truly mart, adaptive and self-healing objects that can change their shape and properties over time.
For 95% of firms in manufacturing this is not about going to the bleeding edge. It is about learning what's already out there, seeing who's using it and how, understanding the costs, risks, and benefits of using it, and those if inaction. Get out there and see what's going on, watch a few minutes of video every day of the manufacturing innovations taking place in every sector and then take a managed approach to doing a few experiments at every stage—have some clear goals, do the learning of what works and what doesn't, scale up promising pilot ideas quickly, and then move on to the couple of must do projects. don't overwhelm yourselves with initiatives that never get to completion and just waste time, energy and human enthusiasm.
Undheim: I’m personally very interested in the new advances in materials engineering, which will change the very concept of what a surface is (it will become intelligent and responsive in various ways), what a machine is (it will become significantly more collaborative) and what an industry is (the word will likely lose its relevance because no industry will remain unchanged by technology coming from other domains and industries).
It’s very difficult to imagine how different our manufacturing facilities (and what we manufacture) will look by the end of this decade. When we now can create radically new, enhanced properties out of previously known materials (polymers, plastics, metals, biological materials, etc.), and then subsequently “print” them layer-by-layer, on demand and inexpensively, the very notion of a factory changes forever. Distributed production, shared ownership, responsibility for long-term environmental impact, completely new issues will need to be resolved.
We need to realize that the progress over the past decade and likely integration advances being made over this coming decade are near unprecedented changes that likely cannot continue at such a pace, even if they could. Now is the time to contemplate what is happening in a deep way. We need to make sure the benefits are widely shared across society. We need to ensure we fully understand what we are creating. Lastly, we need to realize that the world we are entering will take all we can muster in terms of adaptability and educational effort—otherwise 99 percent of the population will simply not feel familiar with the world they are living in anymore.
