Technology & Innovation: The Future of Manufacturing in the USA

Overall, the economic impact of manufacturing on U.S. GDP has been trending lower for many years. Services related sectors of the economy have continued to grow in importance as manufacturing has contacted (these figures can be misleading, however, since US manufacturing has become a huge consumer of services).

That is today, but what is the future of manufacturing in the U.S.?

Technologies of the future will revolutionize the manufacturing industry, providing an opportunity to reenergize this former wealth building engine of the nation. While many new technologies are surfacing, it seems likely that a convergence of those noted below in creating Factories of the Future hold the most promise for driving this renaissance:

Advanced Sensors – Future sensors will be intelligent, capable of interacting with other sensors in real-time to form a better understanding of an activity or environment.

Robotics – The flexibility, mobility, and ease of programmability present in today’s industrial robots have opened many new applications for this technology.

Additive Manufacturing – Additive manufacturing is a great fit for engineering driven, custom build based processes used by equipment builders.

Industrial Internet – Forming the central communications and neural network of the globally integrated Factory of the Future, this derivative of the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the enabling backbone that brings these various new technologies together as a synergistic whole.

We are on the doorstep of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – also being called “Industry 4.0.”

• Industry 4.0 will include “cyber-physical production systems” interacting with sensor-laden “smart products” that will tell production machines and systems how they should be processed.
• Rigid, centralized factory control systems will give way to decentralized intelligence and flexibility as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication optimizes the shop floor autonomically.
• Manufacturing processes will govern themselves in a decentralized, modular system.
• Smart devices will work together via the Industrial Internet to create an industrial cloud of digital data (a subset of “Big Data“) which spans the globe, creating an entirely new construct for supply chain management.

As with all past revolutions, some with the foresight and ingenuity to move forward into the new paradigm will prosper. Many who do not adapt will be left in dusty recollections of a time gone by. What will the future of your organization be – successful pioneer or a fading memory?