How new techniques and technologies can boost efficiency across your business.
Advanced manufacturing uses innovative technologies to improve existing processes, simplify production workflows, and enhance the creation of new products.
Investing in these sophisticated techniques and solutions allows you to support your organization’s long-term growth objectives while maintaining a competitive advantage.
The goal of advanced manufacturing is to increase an organization’s productivity by improving its flexibility and product customization capabilities. When done well, advanced manufacturing offers several benefits for your business:
By investing in more robust processes and equipment, you can promote innovation and strengthen the overall competitiveness of your business. It’s important to note that in order for these advanced processes to work, you must be willing to upskill your staff on the finer points of how to use the new technology.
Advanced manufacturing is not meant to minimize the need for human workers. Instead, it should be viewed as a force multiplier, one that maximizes the productivity and capabilities of each team member by eliminating redundant tasks and controlling for error.
Under a traditional manufacturing model, many workflows are disjointed or isolated.
The advanced manufacturing model, on the other hand, turns the concept on its head, helping ensure that all of your processes, workflows, and equipment are connected—enabling information-sharing and giving you end-to-end visibility.
Integrating your workflows and processes requires an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that offers connectivity and customizability. Think of your ERP system as the center of your advanced manufacturing ecosystem— uniting all of your other resources while setting the stage for automation and optimized production.
On the back end, these tools prioritize data collection. You can gather information on every process or piece of machinery, then analyze this data to measure organizational performance.
This method also helps you spot weaknesses in your workflows, revealing where you may need to proactively implement changes to reduce waste and increase productivity. Such a data-driven approach also promotes predictive maintenance, resulting in less costly downtime.
Through digital manufacturing, you use digital tools to assist with design and product performance simulation. This saves you money and time by uncovering design flaws before you’ve invested capital in machinery retooling, prototyping, and production.
Rooted in minimizing waste while maximizing productivity, lean manufacturing has been around for decades. But modern businesses are now using robotics and automation to get even leaner and further eliminate inefficiencies.
A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is designed to be adaptable, able to quickly switch over to producing different products. Your FMS setup might use robots, computer-controlled processes, and computer numerical control (CNC) machines to make small batches of customized goods.
Popular in aerospace and defense, precision manufacturing focuses on creating goods with a high degree of accuracy and consistency. While all industries strive to make goods that are near-perfect, the stakes are highest in this highly regulated sector, as well as in electronics and auto manufacturing.
A sustainable approach to manufacturing integrates environmental considerations into your processes, aiming to reduce waste and energy consumption. Prioritizing sustainability can make your goods more appealing to consumers while also reducing your carbon footprint.
Now that you’ve got a better idea of which industries have adopted these new processes to push the limits of product design and development, let’s explore these technologies in greater detail. Not all of these will be a good fit for your particular industry, but strategically adopting some of them can help you better serve your clients and stand out in a shifting marketplace:
Additive manufacturing builds objects layer by layer from digital models, allowing you to produce complex shapes with less material waste. You can use 3D printers for prototyping or designing highly customized products.
One downside to 3D printing may be its lack of scalability. It can be difficult to achieve high production volumes using additive processes, due to the high investment costs associated with 3D printers.
Collaborative robots (“cobots”) work alongside your human staff, performing tasks like assembly, inspection, and product stocking. While the bots may get most of the attention, they don’t operate alone.
Instead, they rely on automation software, which means you’re able to create custom business rules that trigger specific actions when certain conditions are met. For instance (although this is an oversimplification of the concept), you may create a rule that instructs a robot to pick a selected item once you receive a specific order from a customer.
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to edge devices and sensors that send and receive data via the internet. Examples of these include smart temperature sensors in a warehouse freezer, monitoring devices on your manufacturing equipment, or even the tablets your employees use to oversee operations.
Each IoT device relays information to a centralized location, such as your ERP platform. A single sensor may only provide a small piece of the puzzle, but when you put all of these bits of information together, you can obtain comprehensive insights into overall business performance.
Thanks to IoT devices, you can also implement preventive maintenance protocols—reducing the likelihood of downtime, promoting better profitability, and offering long-term cost savings.
Alongside machine learning (ML), AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of data to optimize your processes. With both AI and ML, you can predict maintenance needs, improve quality control, and weigh the costs and benefits of different processes, materials, and strategies. These insights help you see the big picture and make the most of your finite resources.
Advanced manufacturing involves much more than new production tools. New materials, such as composites, graphene, and nanomaterials, open the door for different techniques like 3D printing. These materials offer superior properties like strength, durability, and conductivity.
The definition of advanced manufacturing is broad for a reason: it is a concept that takes different forms depending on the industry that adopts it. Across the manufacturing sector, businesses are creating robust products through dynamic new technologies:
Advanced manufacturing plays a critical role in producing complex components with high precision and reliability.
With that in mind, aerospace companies use 3D printing to create lightweight, durable parts for aircraft and spacecraft that allow them to reduce weight, saving on fuel costs. These businesses have also adopted composite materials due to their strength and resistance to environmental factors, which in turn increases the durability and longevity of mission-critical parts.
One thing to keep in mind is that working with more sophisticated materials requires the use of complex new machinery, including robotics. As with many innovations, advanced manufacturing is an interconnected ecosystem of tools and technology.
The automotive sector leverages advanced manufacturing processes to increase production and support more innovative designs.
Many automakers already use robotics equipment—for instance, to speed up assembly lines and increase production efficiency while reducing human error. Electric vehicle (EV) makers are particularly reliant on modern production techniques, especially when creating batteries.
Recently, businesses in the automotive space have started to explore additive manufacturing. Through these processes, automakers can effectively decrease waste, create vehicles using fewer materials, and rapidly prototype complex parts.
Advanced manufacturing technologies have also had a profound impact on the medical sector. Device designers use 3D printing and precision robotics to create personalized medical devices and implants. As a result, patients now benefit from custom-fitted implements that offer better performance, fit, and comfort.
Some of the most visionary companies are also exploring bio-compatible materials, which may make products safer and more adaptable to each patient. In the long term, inventors hope that these materials will be used to treat chronic conditions or even to create replacement organs.
Robotic technologies allow electronics companies to miniaturize the components for new and more compact devices. These businesses use precision machining and photolithography to create intricate parts and circuits on a microscale. Looking ahead, designers will be able to create progressively smaller yet more powerful chips and devices.
Finally, the energy sector has also incorporated advanced manufacturing in its efforts to establish a more efficient and sustainable system. The production of solar panels and wind turbines, for instance, uses innovative materials and processes to reduce costs and make these products more efficient.
In some instances, the differences between advanced manufacturing and traditional manufacturing can be subtle. But on other fronts, the disparity is much more apparent.
The biggest difference between the two may be how they maximize efficiency. Traditional workflows rely heavily on human labor, conventional machinery, and manual or semi-automated processes. Advanced manufacturing, on the other hand, prioritizes robotics, AI, and automation.
From a flexibility perspective, traditional manufacturing represents a fairly rigid process. Mass production techniques are optimized for creating large quantities of identical goods—making changes to these existing workflows can be costly and time-consuming. Conversely, more modern techniques offer greater adaptability and flexibility.
Workforce requirements also vary significantly, as traditional processes require more employees with manual skills and knowledge of basic machinery. In contrast, advanced manufacturing values a smaller but highly skilled workforce that is adept in data analysis, technology, and engineering.
Understanding these variances will help your organization adopt more modern processes while successfully training (and retaining) the people who will oversee these innovations.
Adopting new technologies and processes will help future-proof your business while unlocking several key advantages:
By adopting new tools and processes, you can streamline your production processes, identify sources of waste, and make your entire business more productive.
From a labor perspective, you can reduce your dependence on human workers, thereby allowing for expanded production windows. With the right approach, you can produce goods 24/7.
Computer-aided design (CAD) software and 3D printing solutions offer unmatched precision and control over goods production.
Withe close oversight of production processes, you’ll reduce your margin of error and help ensure that every item meets your quality standards.
By boosting your ability to consistently produce high-quality goods, you’ll improve your brand image, brand loyalty, and customer satisfaction.
Advanced technologies like 3D printing offer improved flexibility and customization alongside high levels of precision and control.
By using these techniques, you offer your customers bespoke products without the need for expensive molds or tools—an effective way to increase your bottom line and differentiate your business in a crowded, competitive landscape.
Sustainability is a core component of advanced manufacturing, with many technologies designed to minimize waste and energy consumption. Sustainability is vital for a variety of reasons:
Finally, integrating advanced manufacturing technologies into production processes significantly enhances worker safety. Automation and robotics can take over repetitive, physically demanding, or hazardous tasks, reducing the amount of risk your workers face every day.
You can also adopt digital tools for training and maintenance tasks, further decreasing your workers’ exposure to dangerous equipment and environments. Improving safety boosts morale, lowers healthcare costs, and reduces downtime—a true win-win.
Adopting advanced manufacturing technologies and processes is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage and stay relevant with your clients. But you don’t have to implement end-to-end changes overnight.
Start by identifying the areas of your business where modernization will help provide the strongest return on investment, and prioritize new technologies that will have a direct impact on those segments.
Keep in mind that you need to lay the groundwork for advanced manufacturing by unifying your data with a centralized ERP platform. Once you’ve got the right software in place, you’ll be free to explore other ways to modernize your workflows.
To learn more about advanced manufacturing and ERP technology—and how both can align with your business goals—let’s talk.
