Smart manufacturing is about playing your cards right

Peeking at the world of smart manufacturing can instantly feel like tumbling headlong into a cauldron of alphabet soup.

IMV, MCM and PAM – and don’t even get me started on IWSN, MES and IIOT. Pity the naïve business leader who thought they “only" had to master those two quintessentially modern letters, AI.

Smart manufacturing is systems, sensors and cybersecurity. It’s fiendishly complex, it’s a Hail Mary data gamble – oh, and of course, it’s prohibitively expensive territory to enter.

Isn’t it?

At this point, Professor Henrik von Scheel takes a languid draw on his cigar. “No,” he tells me, patiently.

“Smart manufacturing is one of the most misunderstood topics,” says the influential strategist and self-styled “Godfather of Industry 4.0.” “The core element is people. And the core to any successful change in your organization always resides in people's ability to adapt.”

The former adviser to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Angela Merkel quietly dismisses three more letters from smart manufacturing’s doom-laden dictionary: ERP.

“Companies treat smart manufacturing like an ERP system. But digitalization should never be focused on processes. If you're spending more than $150k you’re making a mistake, big time.”

In any case, an investment of any size is a tiny down-payment on what von Scheel describes as a “humungous” business opportunity. It’s already a market that one global analyst valued last year at US$108.9 billion – and estimated would more than double to US$241 billion by 2028. *

Akhila Tadinada is among those who’ve gone all in. The co-founder and CTO of Xemelgo – which designs software that’s “drop-dead simple, so as to not intimidate our customers” – says manufacturing is the lifeline of any country and agrees that people, in turn, are the lifeline of its success.

“Offering access to technology and upward mobility is a huge hiring imperative to hire the best and the brightest,” she says. “For lack of better words, to make manufacturing sexy again.”

Both von Scheel and Tadinada urge newcomers to start small, learn from any failures, and slowly build out as required. Or: “Do it incrementally,” as Rockwell Automation’s former director of advanced technology, Dave Vasko, put it to me.

“You’d hate to see people betting their entire business on the outcome of this, if they don't really know what they're doing.”

But Vasko is excited, rather than cautious, about the future. “Simulation and the digital twin of a factory can provide you information for solutions nobody’s ever tried before,” he told me. “That can have extreme impacts and be incredibly transformative.”

The three enthusiasts are joined in this Smart Manufacturing edition of Transform magazine by:

• A Turkish bus-design executive who says you either invest in smart manufacturing, or go out of business.
• A Singaporean professor who highlights the central choice facing humans: manage algorithms or be managed by them.
• A German analyst who hails 5.5G technology as the key to providing a cheaper, more gradual, evolutionary way into factory digitalization.
• An English manufacturer harnessing data to create an environment-saving catalyst that “upcycles” carbon and uses it in everyday products.
• And an American researcher who compares digital transformation to a shark: “If it doesn't keep moving, it dies.”

Another global array of insightful thought leaders, helping to shed light on another global technological innovation. And all agree on one thing: Smart manufacturing is revolutionizing our factory production and supply processes. The world continues to Transform.

*marketsandmarkets.com’s smart manufacturing market report 2023