MARCH 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8oving out of the Industrial Revolution, the mental image of Manufacturing was a cluttered shop floor with large machines and people in greasy overalls working around them. The machine production replaced craftsmanship and large factories were born. People moved from the fields into the cities and a new social era was born with it. In the 19th century, electricity simplified those large machines and reconfigured the interior of the factories. Now, the machines could be far away from the steam generators without energy losses. The assembly production line made its appearance and was immediately filled with cheap human labor. Later, electricity brought with it a series of innovations that continuously provided productivity increases to this model; muscle power was tamed and successfully substituted by mechanical power energized by electricity. By mid-20th century, data out of manufacturing was reserved to the engineers, to the only people capable of making sense out of it and providing a diagnosis on a machine malfunction, product quality or a production planning situation. Islands of local information acquisition and processing were born across the manufacturing floor. At that moment, the mechanical power had an ally in the electronic devices that provided a primitive sensing and capacity of processing information giving birth to industrial automation. Workflows were simplified and production lines were revamped with automated solutions to make a single massive, unique, and cheap product over and over again. Productivity gains started to shift from human labor dependent to asset dependent, and manufacturing models such as dedicated factories were born. It was clear that by the end of the 20th century, the mechanical actions used to transform raw material into finished goods were mastered. A single product could be made in large volumes faster and cheaper than ever before, by controlling the flow of information using Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) as the orchestra director instructing machines what to do, and in what order in a simplified automated line.Before the dawn of the 21st century, information became digital, and the internet disrupted society creating new business models (and bubbles). "Things" got smarter and mobility entered society connecting the world as never before. Under the pressure of this progress, one fits all products didn't seem appealing, late deliveries were not accepted and having the ability to alter purchase orders at any time was demanded. Manufacturing once again mismatches these new requirements and clashed, still struggling to comply with these new demands. So now, it is time to make manufacturing cool again. It is time to give customers what they are asking for. It is time to reinvent manufacturing as we did when moving Make ManufacturingCool AgainIn My View OLIVER PEREZ, EMI MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR, BDOliver PerezM
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