The
Big M Conference in Detroit drew multiple manufacturing companies, big and small, this past month, and served as a prime venue to exchange new ideas on how to continue refining the industry to adjust to a 21st century world that is rapidly changing.
Two major companies, GE and sealing giant Freudenberg-NOK, delivered messages targeted for the Conference that directly addresses those changes. Comparing their platforms can be very useful in finding patterns of what the community as a whole is trending towards as an overall philosophy.Starting with GE, which recently published an article in
GEreports boiling their approach down to "four pillars": Virtual Manufacturing, Intelligent Machines, Flexible Factories, and Reconfiguerable Supply Chains. All four provide the ground for "brilliant factories"; plants more organic in operation and valuing smart data as a needed element, not just a supplemental advantage:
"To build what we call a Brilliant Factory—or a 21st century digital model—each of the four pillars will need a strong IT infrastructure that ties the manufacturing supply chain together and creates data highways for information to be transmitted wherever it needs to go. It also will require a common software platform that can integrate all of the data systems of a company’s manufacturing operations. These are both pieces GE is building to provide that IT support network"
Compare this to Fredenberg-NOK CEO Dr. Theodore G. Duclos's
talk at the Big M, emphasizing the company's Six Guiding Principles to steer it towards an evolution from the days of "lean manufacturing" to a more sophisticated, data-driven model of sustainability:
"Ultimately the six Principles – value for customer, responsibility, innovation, leadership, people and a long-term orientation – will provide the framework needed for Freudenberg-NOK to embrace the industrial evolution taking place in manufacturing, and the company will continue to meet and exceed customer demands and prosper", Duclos said.
"Whether we realize it or not, our journey to lean processes has been leading us to sustainability all along," Duclos concluded. "The principles of lean systems will inevitably lead us to create manufacturing processes that can close the carbon cycle that has been unsustainably open for many years."
Both long-term outlooks tend to hit on a few notions:
-Flexibility is key to sustainability. Both companies value the notion of being able to customize, whether it be for clients or for employees. GE essentially goes so far as to acknowledge this level of flexibility will most likely change the assembly line model for good ("The assembly line represented a huge leap in productivity for factories, but try to make data-driven system-optimal real-time adjustments and changes to the production process and you will find it difficult to do.")
-Automation over traditional labor. Yep, the robots are here. With the kind of affordability goals GE desires (20 percent increase in manufacturing and supply productivity), and its pillar devoted to factory-floor machines that operate within a real-time data network, the emphasis of automated labor over human is pretty much in black-and-white.
Freudenberg-NOK is very intriguing in its desire to see production cycles parallel those of the biological world, but again, this is also reflective of a general aversion to relying on human hands on the 21st century factory floor. While this may sound like bad news in the short run for employment numbers, one can hope local governments wise up to where the labor demand will obviously show itself: design, development, and thought-based skills to keep global-sized digital networks not just surviving, but thriving.
Donal Thoms-Cappello is a freelance writer for Rotor Clip Company.
