By Jean-Jacques DeLisle, contributing writer
When you look at forecasts suggesting that the United States and China will be neck-and-neck for the most competitive manufacturing economies in the world, you might be skeptical at how the U.S. could produce as much as China with its vastly larger population. Much of the justification for this prediction stems from the increased adoption of technologies that mitigate the value of cheap labor in a manufacturing economy. Moreover, consumption per capita in the U.S. is still near the highest in the world, and there are benefits to using automation, smart manufacturing, and industrial robotics to lower manufacturing and shipping costs, reduce lead time on products, and provide greater intellectual property protection than offshoring can.
Image source: Pixabay.
Manufacturing has always been a competitive industry, and to produce products that meet the cost, quality, low lead time, smart technology integration, and customization that the consumer industry demands requires embracing new smart manufacturing technologies powered by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIoT and smart manufacturing are about more than just enabling communication between high-tech robots in a factory. Advanced communication, sensing, and computing technologies can be used to gain valuable insights from the entire manufacturing, shipping, and customer satisfaction change, while also making adjustments in real time to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and enable much faster product enhancements that meet customer needs.
A cornerstone of smart manufacturing is the industrial robot, whose cost to purchase and operate is steadily declining, while features, programmability, and performance of these next-generation machines is increasing. This means that instead of requiring massive manufacturing facilities with huge supply lines and access to a large workforce base, more compact and efficient facilities leveraging industrial robots could be located close to where their production is delivered, further reducing shipping costs and lead times. Moreover, the much lower capital cost of these machines, also integrated with new manufacturing techniques, such as 3D printing, is enabling access to high-precision and high-throughput manufacturing to smaller firms, and even private individuals.
Other critical benefits of industrial robotics are quality control and intellectual property protection. With a more integrated manufacturing process that leverages built-in sensors, data-logging, and real-time, cloud-based heuristics and computing, steady enhancements and adjustments can be made that improve production over time. With upcoming enhanced machine learning, and even artificial intelligence (AI) systems, future smart manufacturing technologies could learn ways to produce products faster, with less waste and complex setup. Product testing could be done while assembling a product, which may also give valuable insights to future product design enhancements and supply chain optimization.
Additionally, with design, prototyping, and manufacturing in the same facility, along with component-level tracking and validation, industrial robotic manufacturing systems could ensure that all parts of a product are authentic, not counterfeit, and that all of the manufacturing stages are protected in-house. This would remove the need for cost and complex anti-counterfeit techniques currently used to prevent reverse-engineering from outsource manufacturing.
Though industrial robots are often labeled negatively for their potential in eliminating manufacturing jobs and manufacturing labor wages, the fact that less labor is necessary also demonstrates that industrial robotics are enhancing manufacturing systems. Much like with agriculture, word processing, and telephone switch operators, technologies and economies change, and labor requirements change with them. There’s a silver lining for those willing to leverage these new technologies, along with opportunity for innovation, as never before have the tools for creating new technologies and products been as accessible. A skilled labor force with modern expertise could go a long way in improving the national economy and increasing the pace of innovation.
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