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Speeding the flow of jobs through the shop, while maintaining top quality, ranks among the hallmarks of any successful manufacturing operation’s goals.

Edge. Cloud. Digital twin. AI. AR. VR. Cobots. Once they were buzzwords. Now, they are becoming technical realities in mid- to large-scale manufacturing plants in North America.

Robots and job shops have not typically been talked about together. After all, everyone knows that automation is only suitable for high-volume production, and the typical mom-and-pop operation is anything but—its schedule filled with orders for high-mix, low-volume, and often highly complex work.

America Makes, the public-private partnership that the Obama administration set up to foster research and innovation in additive manufacturing, achieved a significant milestone late last year: an online portal to track gaps in additive manufacturing (AM) standards.

The “Global Robotics Report 2019” found that 79 percent of automation distributors do not believe their customers understand the safety requirements of installing a collaborative robot, or cobot.

As we enter Industry 4.0, the lines continue to blur between the digital and the physical. With this, the workplace is rapidly changing at every level in every industry.

U.S. manufacturing in general, and small- and medium-sized manufacturers in particular, are in danger of being left behind as Europe and Asia move faster toward Industry 4.0, John Dyck, CEO of the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), told congressional staff, federal agency staff in a February briefing.

With an influx of investment in digital factories, the playing field is changing and the ROI for digitizing production is becoming ever more apparent. However, restraints, such as company size and a disconnect between IT and OT, means the road to a successful digital transformation is one very few will be able to do alone.

Cloud technology presents manufacturers with opportunities to improve the flexibility, scalability and efficiency of their operations. Realizing these benefits will require more than simply doing a one-to-one transfer of current technology to cloud-based servers.

For years, companies have struggled to understand how additive manufacturing (AM) can add value to their businesses. This makes sense because for a long time, additive tech didn’t meet the threshold for producing industrial-grade parts.