The Manufacturing of Tomorrow
To envision how manufacturing will look like in the future, let’s talk about the manufacturing of today, let’s talk about how things are made. Manufacturing is cost, time, & resource intensive, making it inaccessible to most businesses that aspire to bring their innovation to life. It’s a no-brainer when I say manufacturing is the farthest from being planet-friendly.
The infamous C word and the infamous B word
In the last 18 months, we saw how the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and other geo-political issues & trade wars, Suez canal crisis, etc., hindered the global flow of goods bringing supply chains across many critical industries including ventilator production to a standstill, and this just goes on to show how vulnerable manufacturing supply chains are. One of the core reasons for this vulnerability is the centralisation of manufacturing.
In typical centralised manufacturing, you have a company investing hundreds of millions or billions into building a centralised mega factory producing products in the millions of volume to meet economies of scale. These mass manufactured goods are then stored in massive warehouses that consume energy, resources and generate CO2 and wastes. When the demand is triggered, they are then put on gas-guzzling ships, trains, aircrafts, and trucks to be transported across continents & countries to reach local warehouses and then shipped again down the supply chain to customers. For some context on the extent of environmental damage, let’s zoom in and look at just two steps in the supply chain i.e., Warehousing & Logistics. Globally, these two steps whose core function is simply to store and ship goods from factories to customers alone are responsible for more than 900 metric tonnes of CO2 and more than 2 million tonnes of industrial wastes, plus they costs manufacturers more than £256bn every year (McKinsey/MIT ), so not very environment-friendly or pocket-friendly.
Even on the primitive technical level, traditional subtractive manufacturing practices like CNC machine are planet-scarring to say the least. In these subtractive methods, the raw material is a big block of metal which is then milled or sculpted to get the final object, generating a lot of material wastes in the process.
There’s more to a product than meets the eye. A product is only as green as its manufacturing and if that product does more damage to the environment in its manufacturing stage even before it lands in the hands of consumers, then that defeats the whole purpose behind “sustainable” products. This is why rather than having a narrow tunnelled focus on sustainability, we need to have a holistic view focusing on sustainability, especially manufacturing.
So, how we do we go about making things in a green way? How do we ensure that when a product lands in the hands of consumers, it’s done the least damage to the environment as possible?
3D Printing or Additive Manufacturing is the simple answer. As the name indicates, you create products by adding material layer-by-layer, thereby generating little to zero material waste.
The economic and environmental benefits of Additive Manufacturing are exhaustive. Additive Manufacturing allows you to move your warehouse to the cloud and produce products on-demand as and when needed at the very point of demand using a global network of distributed microfactories — that means you can now simply download or “digitally ship” product design files for a localised distributed manufacturing closer to your customers or target market. On-demand local production means no costs or risks of unsold inventory, radically environment-friendly now you don’t need to physically ship goods from one place to another, no more warehousing costs, no eye-watering import/export tariffs and a quicker turnaround time. This transition to a digital, data-driven & cloud-based manufacturing will make supply chains very lean, robust, and resilient to pandemics.
This is not science fiction nor is it a ponder on what the year 3000AD will look like, but rather an evolving reality. We are closer to realising this digital manufacturing future than we are to the year when the first iPhone was released. Additive Manufacturing has been around since the late 80s and has evolved and matured from being just a prototyping tool to becoming a mainstream manufacturing technique that is employed in wider industrial applications from aerospace, defence, automotive, medical, to heavy goods industries.
Democratisation
Additive Manufacturing creates a future where we turn the consumers of today into the producers of tomorrow by removing the barriers for people to bring their innovation to the physical world. Manufacturing in the future will be a cottage industry that is accessible to all.
Scenario: A Tesla equipped with predictive maintenance alerts the owner/rider of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the car’s brake calipers, say the front left caliper’s RUL is 400 miles/2 days 09 hours based on current driving conditions. The owner/car accesses the digital inventory on the cloud where the caliper’s 3D design file that was licensed out by Tesla is stored virtually. The car identifies the nearest ‘Printfarm’ to the owner/car’s location and the order for a spare part is made. The spare brake caliper is now 3D printed and delivered within 24 hours to the owner or the owner can choose to pick up the 3D printed spare part in the nearest ‘parts-cafe’ (inspired by a combination of fast-food drive-thru concept and amazon’s lockers).
The future that I see for the $12 trillion manufacturing industry
→ a fully digital supply chain that completely cuts down the need for physical inventory/warehousing to store manufactured goods and physical shipping of manufactured goods across continents/countries.
→ a future that isn’t in centralised mega factories but rather in distributed microfactories that are deployed locally and ultimately at homes. a future where products are manufactured locally on-demand closer to customers/point of need.
→ a future where manufacturing is secured by Web3.0 in this era of cyber espionage.
→ a future where consumers become producers — a future where manufacturing is a cottage industry.
→ a future where products could be downloaded from the cloud and simply 3D printed in one-click.
→a future where OEMs can focus on developing digital products instead of physical products, since dedicated microfactories will be responsible for on-demand production
→ a future where manufacturing is planet-friendly.
But this new digitisation of manufacturing and supply chain using Additive Manufacturing brings in its own issues like cybersecurity, frequent print failures, Quality/repeatability issues, long and costly trial & errors, steep learning and adoption curve. I’ll be discussing these roadblocks in future articles.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” — Abraham Lincoln
Rev 🚀
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