For several years, as regular readers know, I have been involved with the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition. In fact, Spitzer and Boyes LLC is one of the smallest members of the organization. Why have I spent time working on this? Because I believe that the ideas that the SMLC have created are the future of American manufacturing.
Yeah, I do.
Manufacturing needs a completely new metaphor. Right now, if you stand and look at a process or a discrete assembly line, what you see is control masquerading as worker replacements. That is, when it got too expensive to have a paid, experienced worker watching a gauge and turning a knob or valve, we put in a controller. Now we have groups of controllers, but essentially we are still automating the old human expertise and observation. Robots mimic human workers in discrete automation programs as well.
And as we did this, we growed it like topsy. Nothing easily talks to anything else. Even flavors of the same protocol sometimes don’t work together.
We have basically bumped up against the hard barrier of what the current manufacturing metaphor can do to optimize and make manufacturing more efficient and more cost effective…our only option has been to ship manufacturing offshore, which, itself, is bumping up against the ceiling that the former low cost of manufacturing countries aren’t anymore.
SMLC has defined an excellent roadmap, and established two test beds for what we are calling the Smart Manufacturing Platform. The idea is that the platform can be vendor neutral and company neutral, and can be used like a substrate onto which applications can be bolted. The metaphor is the app store and apps that Apple pioneered for the iPhone.
What we don’t have yet is a lot of end users who want to pioneer more test beds. We need them.
Take a look at http://www.smartmanufacturingcoalition.org and talk to me about what you need, and what SMLC can do for you.
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