Effective organisation involves the efficient co-ordination and exploitation of manufacturing resources. This encompasses both physical resources and knowledge. Relevant topics include virtual tendering and enterprises, shared facilities and resources, novel organisations, incubation units, knowledge management and trading, and electronic commerce. Emphasis in this area is on the use of technology to enhance the involvement and capability of SMEs as well as large organisations.
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Among other things, digital simulation can help engineers save time and money by optimizing the layout of a factory, identifying and automatically correcting flaws in each step of the production process, and modeling product quality and output. Entire assembly lines can be replicated in different locations at relatively low cost. The Industrial Internet and Flexible Automation. Manufacturing hardware can be linked together so that machines are able to communicate with one another and automatically adjust production based on data generated by sensors.
Additive Manufacturing. Commonly known as 3-D printing, additive-manufacturing processes create three-dimensional objects based on digital models by successively depositing thin layers of materials. Such processes are already starting to be used for making prototypes in some industries, including aerospace, automotive parts, and basic consumer items. In the future, these processes are expected to be used to build small batches of new kinds of products made out of one solid piece of material, such as hollow spheres that have no seams.
They are also unlikely to replace labor as the most important cost factor in many industries over the next five to ten years. The material science of 3-D printing is still evolving, for example, with significant advances required to make it viable and cost effective for many substrates and particularly for end-use parts.
But, to varying degrees, each of these advanced-manufacturing tools is already being used by leading-edge manufacturers with impressive results. And they are expected to eventually become important factors in industry. While predictions of a new technological leap in manufacturing have been circulating for quite some time, the move is now getting closer to reality for several reasons.
One is a trend that BCG has been following for the past three years: the shifting economics of global manufacturing. For example, when Chinese labor costs were around one-twentieth of those in the U. Today—after accounting for productivity, logistics, and other costs—the cost gap between China and the U. Similarly, several Eastern European economies have lost much of their cost competitiveness compared with the UK, and Brazil is now estimated to be more expensive than much of Western Europe.
A number of other trends are also having an impact. Rapid advances in information technology, sensors, and nanomaterials are dramatically lowering the costs of leading-edge manufacturing processes and improving their performance. Slowly but surely, digitization has begun to permeate every aspect of the production process, from engineering to management of the supply chain to the factory floor—making production systems more intelligent and highly networked.
At the same time, companies are under mounting pressure to improve their productivity and become more responsive to shifting customer needs. Advanced-manufacturing technologies could potentially help address a number of these needs.
New processes boost productivity and responsiveness to the market by making it possible for manufacturers to quickly and easily modify designs and reconfigure production lines according to customer demands. As a result, manufacturers can generate a greater diversity of products using a similar set of processes.
Factories of the future will combine the efficiency of mass production with custom manufacturing: each machine will be capable of producing a variety of bespoke goods that are made specifically for the needs of customers—something that is difficult, and often prohibitively expensive, to do using conventional manufacturing processes. They could even make one-off objects without additional capital expenditures.
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