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Step inside Pride Solutions LLC’s bustling shop floor in Hutchinson, MN, and you’ll see a shiny new CNC lathe turning out tube after tube of aluminum. While Pride’s machinists do more important things, a Universal Robot model UR10 collaborative robot (cobot) does the grunt work, loading and unloading the machine to keep up with high-volume orders.

When I graduated with an engineering degree some decades ago, I learned that the organizations I was going to work for had internal communication problems. This was especially true for those that designed and manufactured complex machinery such as engines, aircraft, or automobiles.

SME is publishing a series of Smart Manufacturing Industry Reports, with the third being released at IMTS this month. The reports, available at sme.org/reports, detail the advantages of smart manufacturing, the challenges to implementing digital solutions, and, finally, keys to implementing the technologies and tools.

Drilling advancements have spurred the evolution of oil and gas operations from simplistic single-well pad fields to more complex multi-well pads. Today, many producers are using fracking and lateral drilling techniques to place 10 or more wells on one pad.

It’s probably not a bad idea for smaller and mid-sized manufacturers (SMMs) to adopt an “us against them” attitude as they become aware of the prevalence of cyber-attacks in the digital age of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0.

Smart sensors, already an integral feature of many manufacturing plants that are integrating IT and OT, are now making their way into the supply chain where they monitor reliability and shipping conditions, improve predictive maintenance and make just-in-time delivery (the innovation from the 1980s) easier.

Manufacturers face the ongoing challenges of managing exponential product complexity, staying competitive, and avoiding disruption. For many of them that leads to the notion of digital transformation, but they are not always sure how to get started.

Extended reality (XR) has burst onto the scene in the last few years, offering us amazing visualization possibilities in myriad application areas along the aerospace supply chain. While there has been explosive growth in this space of late, there is actually a very rich history between XR technologies, aerospace and Boeing.

To a discrete manufacturer, process manufacturing is odd territory indeed. It’s a world in which textiles, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, and food and beverage are produced en masse.

Until 2017, Schneider Electric faced a factory bottleneck at its breaker box plant in Lexington, Kentucky. When the automation cell that welded the boxes went down, all production could be forced to stop.