… And you thought 2019 was exciting!
While change is buffeting the industrial manufacturing industry from a number of directions, the most disruptive changes will be those which manufacturers can and should make for themselves.
by Antony Bourne for Industry Week
photo: iStock/Getty Images Plus
Many of these manufacturers are already taking advantage of technologies like the internet of things (IoT), and as we move further into 2020 will find themselves early adopters of things like artificial intelligence, 5G and 3D printing.
In a departure from past manufacturing technology adoption cycles, the focus will not be entirely on incremental improvement of existing processes. These technologies will ultimately find their way to the core of new business models and revenue streams that will change the very nature of industrial manufacturing.
Prediction 1: 5G will have more machine than human customers
By the end of 2020 there will be more manufacturing devices connected by 5G than there will be people on 5G networks.
Bernard Marr in Forbes points out the tremendous impact 5G will have when it comes to enabling other technologies. Streaming music, TV shows and movies in an uninterrupted way via mobile devices will indeed be easier and more affordable with 5G. But 5G will be more transformational for devices that drive automated industrial processes than for consumer-facing smart devices.
“These advancements will enable connected cars and autonomous driving,” Marr writes. “Smart cities with connected logistics, transport, and infrastructure; enhancement in connected healthcare from robotics to blockchain use cases to wearable telemetry; industrial internet of things and smart factories; and the more extended use of augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality.”
I predict that 5G will make its greatest impact in industrial automation. The ultra-low-latency, ubiquitous connectivity will power sensors on industrial machines, enabling them to talk to each other and generate floods of data that, through machine learning, will unlock new vistas of cost savings and efficiency. China and South Korea are already working in this way, and the U.S. and the U.K. are likely to spend much of the coming year ensuring they don’t get left behind.
Improved communications between machines due to 5G will not just lead to increased efficiency, but rather to the ability automate more complex manufacturing models including configure-to-order and make-to-order. Levels of automation formerly associated only with long-run, repetitive manufacturing will now be able, thanks to the high speed of 5G, to automate multivariate production runs that may result in custom products, regional mass customization or highly configured products, all with less human involvement than is currently the case.