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April 6,2019,Philippines—Although it has only been 19 years and a quarter of the past century since its formal introduction, digital revolution or technology is continuously advancing at an unpredictably rapid rate, and there is no telling if it can be slowed down. Construction, telecommunication, healthcare, agriculture, advertising, and many more—technology has already dramatically transformed almost any industry in existence.

Global manufacturing, in particular, is one of the seemingly most impacted industries of this force to be reckoned with, and is increasingly becoming reliant to it as we move towards the future. To dig deeper on the relationship between the two, here are some of the most apparent examples of how technology is transforming the global manufacturing industry of today.

Increased visibility

Technology has improved to the point where everything can now be monitored in real time. This is made possible by IoT or Internet of Things which is a system that gathers data from the Internet and connects it to the objects of the physical world. With the utilization of IoT, there is not much need to manually check every process because it allows and helps machines detect an issue on its own, alert other machines and employees, and address the issue in real time.

This increased visibility in manufacturing has significantly helped the industry produce work with the best quality, with the least amount of mistakes possible.

Predictive maintenance

The global manufacturing industry has always seen fierce competition between OEMs or original equipment manufacturers, and the rapid technological advancements has only made the competition even fiercer. Utilized since the 1990s, predictive maintenance constantly monitors and evaluates a machine or equipment during normal operation to analyze data and minor shifts in performance, and then detect any possible issue at a very early stage to prevent the problem from worsening.

As a result, predictive maintenance typically reduces machine downtime by 30 to 50% and increases machine life by 20 to 40% according to the article Manufacturing: Analytics unleashes productivity and profitability by McKinsey & Company in 2017, and may possibly create a future without any machine downtime.

Smarter products

The rapid technological improvements is not only pushing the global manufacturing industry to go past its current limits but is also influencing the consumers to demand for products that are more intelligent, more responsive, more convenient, and more connected than the products of yesterday. Because of this, the industry has been increasingly developing smarter products such as cars with GPS and Internet functions, and wearable technology like smartwatches to satisfy consumers.

However, the development of smart products also results in increased dependence of consumers on technology, which causes disturbance and changes on how people normally do their tasks and how they usually live their lives.

Changes in workforce demographics

Following on the development of smarter products, AME engineers must not only be able to mass produce such smart technology, but also continuously improve their current model for product design and development in order to keep up with the consumers’ growing demand and changes in the industry. Included in this is the necessary changes in the required skill set of manufacturing workers. As products become smarter, they now require the integration of complex technology and are no longer simply assembly-line created products.

This and the transition of generation of workers is resulting to moderate to severe shortage in highly skilled manufacturing applicants and resources in over 80 percent of manufacturers according to the 2014 Manufacturing Skills and Training Study done by Accenture.

There is no doubt that technology has allowed the global manufacturing industry and more other industries to move towards the future. Even so, we should also be aware that it does not only transform the global manufacturing industry, but also the world and our lives at large.