How is the fourth industrial revolution changing the landscape of manufacturing?

Question

Accepted Answer

Over the last decade, disruptive technologies such as additive manufacturing, advanced robotics, and artificial intelligence have been transforming global production systems and unleashing a new wave of competition among producers. These technologies are affecting and altering the end-to-end steps of the production process and, as a result, transforming the products that consumers demand, the factory processes and footprints, the management of global supply chains, and industry dynamics. This transition is commonly referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i4.0), a period of time that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres of production. i4.0 offers enormous potential to manufacturers. While some businesses see i4.0 as simply introducing connectivity to machines for remote control / access, leading companies are viewing i4.0 as an end-to-end digital integration of value chains with the shop floor as the epicenter. We see three major trends in manufacturing, these include:From “designing for manufacturing” to unconstrained design—algorithmic design optimization, customer co-creation, and functionally graded, custom materials being employed.From mass production to flexible production—fewer processing steps and shorter lead time, no / limited tooling required, reduction in fixed assets or CapEx, batch sizes of 1From global supply chains to supply unchained—multi-component consolidation, on-location production and use, high ratio of productive output to space utilized (micro factories), distributed production and reshoring These trends are enabled by five key technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including:The Internet of Things (IoT)Artificial Intelligence (AI)WearablesAdvanced Robotics3D PrintingTo learn more about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, please visit our Manufacturing Center of Excellence webpage, our Future of Production webpage and as an example of how i4.0 is impacting local communities, please read our perspective on The Future of Production in Michigan: readiness for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.