Tara Sattar
If you drive about four hours north of London — on top of an abandoned open pit mine you will find out the lesser known place where some of the world’s most influential companies come to fidget with technologies that may shape the future of industrial manufacturing.
University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, or AMRC, the place where there’s a massive machine shop and a nuclear facility, not to mention an aircraft test center, a prototyping space complete with 3-D printers and laser cutters, as well as Europe’s biggest electron beam welder.
Boeing and General Electric (GE) are one of the companies that have experimented there in a bid to transfigure their manufacturing processes, and this is where they anticipate their next great innovations may be born.
“The AMRC started as the playpen for companies to throw challenges at and say, ‘Hey, look, is there an easier, better, cheaper way of doing this that’s more environmentally friendly?’” says Colin Sirett, AMRC’s CEO.
Certainly, there is a lot to play with today. Innovations such as cloud computing, advanced robotics, the Internet of Things, wearable technology and 3-D printing are all revolutionizing the manufacturing process in profound ways. The technologies as such are already able to ramp up production, though some experts expect these efficiencies to skyrocket in the near future as this technology matures — while reducing costs by as much as 40 percent, Sirett estimates. That being said, American manufacturers plan to nearly double their investment in digital technologies, from roughly 2.6 percent of annual revenue today to nearly 5 percent over the next five years, for a total estimated spend of $350 billion, according to a PwC survey.
The evolution from established development to what’s referred to as next-generation mechanized industry 4.0 has been largely facilitated by the big data revolution.
Almost every aspect of the manufacturing process today can be tracked digitally. In fact, Industrial IP predicts that 27 percent of the expected $14.4 trillion that will result from the Internet of Things will occur in the manufacturing sector by 2022, with a predicted total value of $3.88 trillion.
Formerly, manufacturers had to hang around until a creation came off the assemblage line with an imperfection to observe something might be incorrect, and then spend time and energy into discovering and fixing the problem, with losses collecting with every second of downtime.
But today, machines can be built-in with sensors that track the performance of each character part in real time, and they can even foretell when an issue might take place, allowing manufacturers to correct it before any defects occur. This type of high-tech, predictive forecasting “in its nature is very significant in the manufacturing environment,” says Bob McCutcheon, the U.S. industrial products industry leader for PwC.
Still, the combination of connected devices, the Internet of Things, 3-D printing and big data has already begun to revolutionize the manufacturing process. McCutcheon likens it to the invention of the iPhone, explaining that once the technology became available, developers were able to build incredibly innovative apps that were hard to imagine before Apple’s App Store ever opened its virtual doors. “We’ve got the technology,” he says. “Now step back and watch all the innovation that takes place.”