Driven by data

Well it’s that time again. This will be the last issue of 2014 as yet another year comes to a close.

UK manufacturing has held up pretty well and continues to thrive. The marketplace is competitive but innovation, combined with continuous investment in technology, people and processes is most certainly prevailing. In Europe, the UK has in many ways been setting the pace. For such a small island we certainly punch above our weight.

Looking back, reflecting and learning from our experiences is one thing; looking to the future is something entirely different. There’s lots of buzzwords flying around at the moment – Big Data; The Internet of Things; The Industrial Internet; Industry 4.0 – but what’s it all about? Well, I’ve just watched a very interesting video from Sandvik Coromant entitled: ‘An Outlook into the Future of Manufacturing’ and it’s really worth a look.

The future apparently is all about data, data and more data. One presenter in the video explains the evolution citing three main reasons: (1) exponential advances in technology (chips, computers, memory, bandwidth – Moore’s Law essentially; (2) the scarily huge data universe we live in – he describes data as the lifeblood of science; it’s how we learn and how we test our theories; and (3) Innovation – which happens when you combine existing building blocks to make new ones.

An example mentioned is Google’s recent developments with a driverless car: in basic terms, that’s an old innovation (the car) combined with powerful computers, a shedload of sensor data and very clever software. The result is something new and never seen before.

The manufacturing world of the future will be heavily dependent on data to enable us to make better predictive, educated and informed decisions. Cutting tools on machines for example will be linked to logistics systems so that when they need to be changed it’ll be an automatic, automated process. Those decisions will be made on performance derived from – you guessed it – data. The ‘system’ will know exactly when the tool needs to be changed.

“Humans have way too much faith in their own intuition, experience and judgment,” one speaker on the video claims. “It’ll be a tough shift but we have to become more humble about our own abilities and make our business decisions much more data driven.”

Take a look at http://bit.ly/1qHyJ0x. Controversial maybe; interesting definitely!