Digital Technologies for Manufacturing Innovation
The future prosperity of the UK will increasingly depend on maintaining a resilient and sustainable manufacturing sector based on sophisticated technologies, skills base and manufacturing infrastructure with the ability to produce a high variety of complex products faster, better and cheaper. In high labour cost economies, manufacturing productivity and competitiveness will depend on maximising the utilisation of all available resources, empowering human intelligence and creativity and capturing and capitalising on available information and knowledge from design, manufacture, use and disposal of products. It will also require facilities that can quickly respond to customer requirements and minimise energy, materials and resource usage whilst maximising productivity, sustainability and economic competitiveness.
The recent national seminar on “Digital Technologies for Innovative Manufacturing: Beyond Industry 4.0”, hosted by the University of Nottingham, was attended by more then 150 delegates including over 80 key industrial decision makers and identified the urgent need for a national strategy for developing technologies for future intelligent manufacturing factories.
Targeted Economic Impact
The Digital Technologies for Manufacturing Innovation (DTMI) initiative will aim to create the strategy and delivery infrastructure for the development and accelerated implementation of digital technologies in manufacturing for dramatic increase of the global competiveness of UK manufacturing by enabling the implementation of advanced digital technologies in design, manufacture and service support. For instance, the US DMDII has identified the potential benefit of implementing intelligently connected machines and systems in commercial aviation alone as $30B over 15 years with DoD and other economic sectors citing similar business cases and opportunity for strong returns on investment. To substantiate the UK case for Intelligent Manufacturing Technologies there is a need for early studies to quantify the expected economic impact and increase in competitiveness.
Digital Manufacturing and design are drawing attention from innovators and investors alike. Sometimes referred to as ‘Industry 4.0’ (especially in Europe) or as the ‘Industrial Internet’ (General Electric’s term), these labels reflect a basket of new digitally-enabled technologies that include advances in production equipment (including 3-D printing, robotics and adaptive CNC mills), smart finished products (such as connected cars and others using the Internet of Things), and data tools and analytics across the value chain.
These technologies are changing how things are designed, made, and serviced around the globe. In combination, they can create value by connecting individuals and machines in a new ‘digital thread’ across the value chain—making it possible to generate, securely organize, and draw insights from vast new oceans of data. They hold the potential for disruptive change, analogous to the rise of consumer e-commerce. In 2010, when some two billion people connected online, the Internet contributed approximately $1.7 trillion to global GDP. What’s in store when 50 billion smart machines—deployed across factory floors, through supply chains, and in consumers’ hands—can connect with one another?
McKinsey had an opportunity to poll executives at companies participating in the DMDII [Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, Chicago, USA]. While 80 percent of the respondents consider digital manufacturing and design to be a critical driver of competitiveness, only 13 percent rate their organizations’ digital capability as ‘high’.