We are a high tech culture centered on an ever more high tech industry. Our tools have been designed to fit the natural skills and predilections of the new generation of workers, allowing them to finally work hand-in-(robotic)-hand, human and machine, to achieve the leanest, most efficient production the world has ever seen.
Originally published in the IMTS Insider.
Defining the New Era
Advanced manufacturing is a big topic here at IndustryWeek, both from the high end perspective -- understanding its potential impact on the industry -- and the low -- trying to work out what the term even means. Of course, neither of these concerns -- maybe especially not the latter -- have yet been settled.
However, I did catch a glimpse of advanced manufacturing in action this year -- just the briefest view of what all of the disparate technologies of 2012 are creating in the industrial world -- all packed up neatly in the busy halls of IMTS.
Somewhere in those endless rows of machine tools, grinders, robots and software suites of McCormick Place, I was suddenly struck by how outrageously high-tech the industry had become. In that great throng of manufacturing technology, I felt for the first time that I was really in the midst of a new era of manufacturing, one in which "advanced" prefix finally made sense.
Today's machines are not the simple drills, mills and lathes of yesterday. They are complex and advanced, running axes numbered by the dozen, picking their own tools, feeding their own parts, blasting their bits with liquid nitrogen, some of them completely processing components from block to precision part in one set-up.
On the IT side, they carry operating systems capable of recording data on every rotation, every movement, every temperature hiccup or indication of future, otherwise undetectable error, to help them ramp up the productivity to unbelievable, space age heights.
It's hard not to look at these machines and be proud of the basic human ingenuity that made them possible, to be proud of the long history of machine tool technology that has resulted in these truly advanced tools.
It is also hard to look at them and not be totally intimidated by the complex engineering they require.
These are complicated machines. The options they present, their engineering flexibility, the impossibly complex programming involved, is just mind boggling. And that is a development that sits rather poorly next to another of 2012's biggest stories: the skilled labor shortage.
