The manufacturing industry has faced hard times for a few years, over the past and employment in this sector has seen a huge drop. But today, latest technologies are constantly changing the face of manufacturing industry and people who belong to this industry are seeing plenty of opportunities to work. This is the unimaginable change in the manufacturing industry through the advanced technology, for a decade.
With the development of latest technology in the manufacturing industry, the sector has bounced back with increased pace. This change can be seen in different businesses that manufacture more for less.
Almost all the changes have come from consumer demand and all they want is things to become faster, unique, and efficient. The day has come where the manufacturer, consumers, and skilled workers are getting benefitted from the 5 latest technologies. Let’s take a closer look at how fast the latest technology is changing manufacturing industry.
3D Printing
3D printing was one of the exciting and biggest things in the past years as it met the exact requirements of the public and manufacturing industry but what it hurts is the time consumption and expensive process. Saying forthright, traditional techniques, such as injection molding is far better than 3D printing in terms of cost and time. Though there are enough benefits of 3D printing, engineers came up with yet to be named new technology to satisfy the consumer needs and they called it as the best alternative to ultrafast 3D printing.
The technique developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory can fabricate the complete 3D shapes in no time, using holographic light fields. Earlier, the layer-by-layer technique was used by the manufacturers for 3D printing, but now, because of this technology, all the 3D parts can be made at once. The engineers are also experimenting with a resin vat for even advanced 3D technology.
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid prototyping is a combination of techniques that are used to create a scale model of a physical part. Do you know how big part Rapid prototyping had in changing the manufacturing industry? It is used in manufacturing product parts in relatively small quantities and most importantly, it is used for testing purpose.
Manufacturers know how important it is to know how a product looks after it has manufactured and rapid prototyping helps with it. It shows how a product or its individual parts looks like, after manufacturing. To speak about the benefits of rapid prototyping in the manufacturing industry, there are many! The time consumed for the development and the risk of errors will be reduced, expands the lifetime of the product, and also enhances the effective communication.
The Internet of Things (IoT)
Interconnectivity is the most crucial thing that should be considered in the manufacturing sector and the better interconnectivity is precisely possible through the Internet of Things (IoT) which results in better communication, improved response time and efficiency. All the electronic devices can be linked together within the existing infrastructure to make it easy for monitoring the complete manufacturing workflow.
Strong Interconnectivity between the various stages of the manufacturing from converting raw material into a product or a product being used by another product is the only reason to see a huge market
An IoT connects to the internet and enables devices to talk to each other by sending and receiving the signals. The IoT connected devices send a message to another device if it detects any failure. This application of IoT in the manufacturing industry results in improved quality and reduced downtime, waste, and cost as well.
The success of manufacturing industry in the Internet of Things is for various reasons and the most important one among them is Industry 4.0 and manufacturing operations.
Cloud Computing
Though manufacturing has been late to the game due to the connectivity and security concerns, it is playing well, now, because of the cloud computing advances. As customer demands are changing constantly, the manufacturing is also changing frequently. People are expecting the high-quality and so it has become mandatory for the manufacturer to be fast, responsive, and efficient which could be possible only through cloud computing.
IoT improves connectivity within a single plant but cloud computing improves it across multiple plants. So, the companies can share the data all over the world in a fraction of seconds by reducing the production time and costs as well. When you are an employer, customer, or supplier, you must need a controlled access to your business operation for decision making and only the true cloud platform can do it by handling the complexity and demands of the modern manufacturing.
Over 70% of manufacturing companies are using cloud computing in some part of their business to increase productivity and efficiency. The modern manufacturing is being completely transformed using cloud computing – the way you operate and integrate into supply chains, design, make products, or how customers use it.
Robotics
Robotics is being used in the medical and automotive industries for a long time and now, the manufacturing sector is getting more benefits from it. We are not saying the tradition model got disappeared, but industrial robots are fixed in the traditional models to execute the complex tasks assigned. Robots are much needed in the current situation to meet the demands of globally changing manufacturing model.
Robotics offer increased quality and productivity that satisfy consumer needs by gaining the ability in deploying various applications. Also, many big tech companies are working hard to introduce more intelligent robots which are not pre-programmed for a specific object and so the failure rates will be very high. However, they can learn from every mistake just like a human, surprisingly. This would be the greatest asset to the manufacturing sector, if the thing goes well, as per the expectations of the tech giants.
Competitiveness has become a great challenge to the manufacturing firms in recent days and there is a great need of latest technology like 3D printing and other small techniques to resist it. Despite the concern that technology reduces human employment, it is very clear that technology is going to make big changes and takes the manufacturing process to a whole new level.
