Moving Beyond Mass Production
Innovation is constant. In the field of advanced manufacturing especially, we have seen consistent advances and improvements over the last decade, with industry impacts like micro efficiency gains all the way to the introduction of brand new manufacturing processes. But if innovation in manufacturing is incremental and constant, how do we know when it’s time for big, industry-wide changes?
We think we are at that time today.
We are at the perfect intersection of new advanced manufacturing capabilities and sudden demand for a supply chain overhaul. Advanced manufacturing includes (but is not limited to) technologies like 3D printing, digital textile production, printed electronics, and subtractive manufacturing, and recent advances in these areas are largely stemming from the invention or discovery of new materials and the new product form factors they can be used to create. Simultaneously, we have just experienced a global pandemic that greatly disrupted supply chains and manufacturing operations with impacts that are expected to last for years to come. The time has never been more appropriate for manufacturing leaders to rethink what their production strategies look like.
This blog post is the first in a three-part series, and will cover some of the key developments we have seen around new advanced manufacturing materials and product form factors. In our next blog, we will focus on new manufacturing models that these developments are making possible, and in the third, we will explore how these new manufacturing models could transform people’s day to day lives in the near future.
So, starting with some key developments:
Materials: Concerning 3D printing, the number of materials that can be 3D printed has increased drastically in the last few years. From 2019 to 2022, the number of printable materials went up from 1700 to 2693 according to the Senvol database. These new innovations have created a wide range of materials including ones that are more sustainable, 3D printable concrete, or even composite materials made that have embedded conductive elements within traditional PLA like carbon, graphene, and copper to create 3D printed electronics.
Form Factor: Leveraging these new materials, industries can begin to rethink their entire manufacturing pipeline with new 3D printed form factors that were previously not possible.
Taking construction as an example, building homes has required time intensive manual labor, including building the home’s structure from wood or brick, pouring concrete, and waiting for it to dry. Leveraging the ability to 3D print concrete can lead to more automated, faster construction with up to 10 times less waste. Dubai is even predicting 25% of new construction will be 3D printed by the year 2030.
These advances aren’t limited to 3D printing. A large shift is also happening in textiles:
Just as we saw a shift from organic textiles to synthetics many years ago, manufacturing innovation has inspired a new wave of functional fibers that have more capabilities than just the mechanical properties of the fiber themselves. Some of these functional capabilities can include conductivity, illumination, and even energy storage. These functional fibers can replace the non-textile components currently needed to make smart and connected wearables, making the creation of 100% textile-based wearables possible. They can also be combined with other textile manufacturing innovations like whole garment knitting and textile embroidery to fully realize their potential and pave the way for a new generation of smart products.
The increasing versatility of 3D printing and growing sophistication and digitization of textiles production are just two examples, but innovation is happening all over the advanced manufacturing landscape. For instance, we didn’t used to think of biology as being manufactured — it’s something that was grown. But now bio-manufacturing is expanding more rapidly than ever before (You can read more about 3D printing living tissue here).
What’s more, while it’s easy to look at these manufacturing advances individually and see the value they hold, in aggregate, they represent a much bigger opportunity. The development and maturation of advanced manufacturing techniques over time have left us with the building blocks we need to bring new manufacturing models to life.
For instance, consider a model that’s pushing the boundary of what we can create from a single machine: all-in-one manufacturing. In this model, a single machine or system can perform multiple manufacturing processes, yielding complete products with no assembly required. MIT has been working on a project called LaserFactory that gives us a glimpse into this future. In this project a single machine capable of laser cutting the product’s form factor, dispensing conductive material, placing electrical components, and curing them in place resulting in a fully functional drone that can literally “fly” off the print bed.
Because only one machine is required to create complex objects, the total manufacturing equipment takes up drastically less space, and can result in better quality control due to fewer manufacturing steps. This approach can also be more sustainable because it allows manufacturing to take place virtually anywhere, including closer to the final product destination.
Here we only provided a glimpse into some of the next-gen manufacturing we are investigating, so please connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to chat more about smart materials & the future of manufacturing. Also, read about the other great work Accenture Labs and the Future Tech R&D team are doing by clicking here.
This article was the first in a three-part series on the future of manufacturing written with
and .Stay tuned for the next article that will be published by Alexandria, where we discuss four additional manufacturing models and walk through how and why business should take note of them.
