Manufacturing Insights

For companies to win with digital transformation, they must expand digital twins to include digital process twins and digital factory twins. aPriori's CEO offers a case study in success with digital twinning.

Artificial Intelligence can't be used for profit until your core manufacturing processes are digitized and made available to deep learning.

The rise of AI-driven modeling tools has some people in manufacturing scrambling to understand the impact of artificial intelligence and wondering how the product design process will change as a result.

Over the past year we have seen in real-time user-friendly AI tools such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and AI image generation from midjourney disrupt the markets for graphic design, web design, and social media content creation. Is product design and manufacturing prototyping the next in line for AI-powered disruption?

Today I'm excited to talk to one of the early founders of AI technology, CEO of Fire&Spark, Dale Bertrand. Dale was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research at Brown University where he also trained as an electrical engineer. His experience using AI to solve engineering problems puts him into a unique position to understand how AI design tools for manufactured products might be changing the workflow for design engineers and even the scope of design projects in manufacturing today.

I wanted to get a sense from Dale Bertrand based on his experience both in the AI field and in the engineering field, whether the innovations we are seeing today in generative AI and machine learning have any real bearing on the way products will be designed and manufactured in the future. I started our conversation by listing some of the AI innovations I've seen transform the creative process in other industries, and asking whether these digital products have any bearing on the future of manufacturing.

The manufacturing world today is feeling the impact of new environmental regulations. There's CSRD, the corporate sustainability reporting Directive, and the CSDD corporate sustainability due diligence directive, which put manufacturers in the hot seat for reporting and planning their carbon output. Then there's the international sustainability standards boards, S1 and S2, which lay out guidelines for reporting resource consumption and emissions respectively, and then there's the Carbon border adjustment mechanism or CBAM, which will make companies pay attention to the environmental cost of material imports, which will soon add up to financial cost as well. For manufacturing companies scrambling to fulfill these new regulations, the first hurdle is finding the right data, you need benchmarks to calculate carbon energy use and other sustainability goals accurately, and where can you get that data? That's where LCA data providers come in.

What does a cost engineer do? What's the hardest part of the job for a cost engineer? And how can SaaS costing solutions help?

Barriers to change stop engineers from innovating. New technology can help change management.

If you talk to any of the top management in large engineering organizations, they will undoubtedly say that they want to push their decision-makers and engineering to adopt more streamlined work processes, to do more with less. They want their frontline engineers to increase the productivity of common work processes, to monitor cost alongside manufacturability and to adopt the best new technology to improve upon the status quo. And then they're frustrated when they find that it's hard to get buy-in from engineering.

What common barriers to organizational change are these teams missing? And how can they go about overcoming the barriers to change so that the culture change can happen to adopt new technology in the short term and to adapt work processes to reduce workload and increase productivity in the long term. For this conversation, I'm delighted to have Mark Rushton, an engineer with an in-depth understanding of the barriers to change within engineering organizations, especially when it comes to the adoption of new technology that can help engineers work smarter, more efficiently and with less change projects, if only they adopt it. Mark is going to shed light on different types of barriers to change, emotional, tactical even political that inhibit change and stifle innovation. And also what effective communication strategies can help frontline engineers overcome barriers to change.

The procurement process in recent years has evolved way beyond simple purchase orders and pricing tables. Today's dynamic supply chain calls for innovative end-to-end solutions, that pair the best procurement software with an awareness of the business processes of your individual procurement team, and how they help the company achieve cost savings and profitability. Call it strategic sourcing or innovative supplier management, the bottom line is that the procurement process must change if the manufacturing industry is to meet the challenges of today's supply chain.

What is Augmented Reality? And what does it mean for manufacturing?

The term augmented reality describes a range of apps, wearable devices, and interfaces that bring the virtual world, and any relevant information it contains, into the real world where it can be used in real time. You might be familiar with ar apps such as pokemon go or other video games for apple's iphone or android. Or you might know about applications of ar systems for work, where ar technology is used in healthcare to project digital information onto the real world environment.

But what is the benefit of augmented reality for manufacturing?

To answer this question, I turned to Nate Taylor, North American Director for Transition Technologies. Nate Taylor advises companies on how augmented reality technology can help OEMs and customers better leverage digital content, and how companies can use these ar applications to boost their profits in real-life.

At a conference where AR experiences were everywhere, where someone in smart glasses was navigating a virtual environment and vendors were exchanging business cards over their mobile devices, Nate Taylor and I shared a very real-world conversation about impact of augmented reality on manufacturing.

Model-Based Definition or MBD can fundamentally transform how we visualize and understand design intent, by adding new dimensions to 2D drawings and pushing the boundaries of 3D CAD models.

Learn how to get your organization to realize the benefits of MBD to bring GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing), tolerance analysis, annotations, and even the PMI (Product Manufacturing Information) into the 3D CAD space.

Since the pandemic, the number of open jobs in the manufacturing industry has exceeded the number of available workers. We all know this. The question is how to fix the worker shortage, or even just how to react to the new shape of the labor market as interest rates fluctuate and companies find it difficult to both find enough workers and provide the better pay they're demanding.

In this labor market, manufacturing companies need to evolve so that labor shortage does not lead to a shortage of profit or innovation.