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.
Skilled Labor in a High-Tech World
The year 2012 was plagued by constant discussion of issues, crises and speculation around skilled labor. According to the coverage to date, the baby boomer retirement sweep, the irresistible pull of Silicon Valley for our most capable engineers and the general slacking of STEM education might regress our industrial progress back to hand lathes and blacksmiths.
But a closer look at today's technology tells a different story.
The technologies proliferating in 2012 -- the tablets and smartphones, the real-time big data crunching software, the dashboard analytics and high-def GUIs -- have all cohered on the face of these new machine tools, providing more transparency to their operations and greater insight into its output than ever possible before.
The designers, meanwhile, have taken a lesson from the phones and tablets already in the hands of the workforce to make the controls from the high tech machine tools comparable in look, feel and intuitive architecture we are already accustomed to.
This has begun a fundamental shift in the role of the worker. Matching a workforce savvy with the technology of today to the advanced, multifunction tools of the trade transforms a normal operator tied to a single machine into a conductor perched on a podium, leading a symphony of manufacturing tools through their automated production cycles.
This is the takeaway from 2012 -- the real story our technological process has been trying to tell.
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.
And that, to me, is advanced manufacturing -- an era 2012 has launched for us, which we will finally explore in 2013.
This story was originally published in the IMTS Insider.
