What Is the Future of Advanced Electronic Manufacturing?

We are on the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution, driven by the evolution of new technologies such as the cloud, Big Data, and Internet of Things. The first industrial revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam engine and the mechanization of manual labor in the 18th century. The second revolution consisted of the application of mass production techniques in the twentieth century. The third was announced during the last decades by electronic systems and computer technologies for the electronic manufacturing services.

Today we are at the edge of a fourth revolution, one that represents the future of manufacturing. Sometimes called Industry 4.0, this revolution is happening in several stages over a period of 10 or even 20 years. But let's not fool ourselves, the result seems to be revolutionary from the current point of view. 

Trends 

The production facilities of the future will be modular and much more flexible than current factories. This will be possible thanks to the use of miniaturized processors, storage units, sensors and transmitters. They are integrated into almost every imaginable type of machines, products and materials, as well as tools and new software for manufacturing data flows in the electronic manufacturing services.

All these innovations will allow products and machines to communicate with each other. As such, a product that is in the process of being manufactured will lead to a digital production memory integrated into it from the beginning. In order to communicate with its environment, at each stage of its production process. In this way, the product becomes a physical cyber system that allows the real world and the virtual world to merge.

The end result will be that the factories of the future can optimize and control their manufacturing processes in a much more flexible way than today. However, although there are already some elements of the 'smart' factory, experts also agree that it will still take a few years to get to the point of almost complete automation. Miniaturized processors, storage units, sensors and transmitters integrated into almost any machine, device or tool will facilitate flexibility in the factory of the future.

New Workers 

Through the rise of these cyber-physical systems, we will see the creation of a new type of operator in our factories, a worker who can adapt to the new requirements of knowledge management. New operations at the manufacturing plant will retain an element of physical work, but will require deeper knowledge and more skills to execute and manage increasingly interconnected systems within the factory and manufacturing process. For example, a planning team will be able to ensure efficient production of an operation plant's program. 

Through a simple, software-based interface that will be able to develop different manufacturing routes for new products, calculate and compare them based on parameters such as performance and cost, covering everything from design feedback and consulting to the optimization and integration of the customer experience supply chain. Achieving this requires the standardization of the different formats, operating systems and programming languages used in these different systems to allow the conversion and transfer of data from one system to another.