The Future of Manufacturing Isn't Just Automation on the Shop Floor
We spent last week at IMTS surrounded by automation and some of the latest technology shaping manufacturing.
And we mean surrounded.
Robots. CNC machines. Inspection technology. Automated material handling. Systems capable of producing incredibly complex parts with a level of speed and precision that would have seemed impossible not that long ago. It was impressive, to say the least!
But somewhere between walking the show floor, talking with manufacturers and seeing all of this technology in action, we kept coming back to a thought:
What about all the work happening around the machines?
Because as automated as manufacturing has become, there is still an incredible amount of work happening behind the scenes that isn’t automated at all.
Someone is pulling information out of one system and putting it into another. Someone is generating a report, emailing a file and waiting for an approval. Someone is letting the next person know it’s their turn. And suddenly, surrounded by some of the most advanced manufacturing technology in the world, the contrast becomes pretty hard to ignore.
Manufacturing Runs on Information, Too
We tend to think about manufacturing in terms of what we can see. Machines make things. Robots move things. Inspection systems measure things. But behind all of that technology is an enormous amount of information that has to move through the organization to keep everything working.
Engineering data needs to reach manufacturing. Quality teams need information from engineering and production. Operations relies on information coming from multiple departments. Suppliers need the latest specifications, and changes need to make their way to everyone they impact.
There are hundreds of these little handoffs happening across a manufacturing organization every day, and a surprising number of them still depend on someone manually making them happen.
Sending an email, updating a spreadsheet, exporting data, generating a report or uploading a file may only take a few minutes at a time. That’s probably why we don’t always stop to question why we’re still doing them manually. But multiply those tasks across dozens or hundreds of employees, systems and processes every day, and they stop being so little.
As manufacturing becomes more connected and product development cycles continue to accelerate, the amount of information moving through an organization is only growing. The challenge isn’t simply having access to that information anymore. It’s making sure it gets where it needs to go, when it needs to get there, without requiring someone to constantly move it along.
The Bottleneck May Not Be on the Shop Floor
Manufacturers spend a lot of time thinking about bottlenecks, and for good reason. If a machine goes down or material isn’t where it needs to be, production can stop. Those problems are visible, measurable and usually pretty hard to ignore.
Information bottlenecks can be much quieter.
An engineering change may be complete, but another team doesn’t know about it yet. A report needs to be generated before someone can move forward. An approval is sitting in an inbox. A task is finished, but the next person in the process doesn’t know it’s ready.
Nothing is technically broken, but work is still waiting.
That raises an interesting question: How much time in manufacturing is lost not because the work can’t be done, but because someone or something is waiting for information?
As manufacturing processes become more sophisticated, information flow becomes just as important as material flow. If the right information can’t reach the right people and systems at the right time, even the most advanced technology on the shop floor can only take an organization so far.
There’s Another Layer of Automation
That’s what we found ourselves thinking about at IMTS. We saw incredible examples of companies automating physical work, but there’s another layer of automation that isn’t nearly as obvious because much of it happens behind the scenes.
What if completing an engineering task automatically kicked off the next part of the process? What if information moved between systems without someone exporting and re-entering it? What if a report generated itself when the right data became available, or the right person was automatically notified when something actually required their attention?
That’s workflow automation, and unlike a robot moving across a show floor, you may never actually see it working. What you see instead is the result: fewer manual handoffs, less time spent chasing information, fewer opportunities for something to fall through the cracks and more time for people to focus on the work that actually requires their expertise.
In other words, automation doesn’t always have to replace a physical task. Sometimes it simply removes all of the unnecessary steps surrounding it.
Automating the Work Around the Work
This is the kind of problem we designed Impact360 to address.
Impact360 is a no-code workflow automation platform that helps automate repetitive processes and information handoffs across engineering, manufacturing, quality, operations and other teams throughout an organization.
Information can move between applications automatically. Reports can be generated and distributed when they’re needed. Notifications can be triggered by specific events, and workflows can advance based on predefined business rules without someone manually coordinating every step along the way.
But the technology itself isn’t really the interesting part. What people get to stop doing because of it is.
An engineer doesn’t have to interrupt higher-value work to repeatedly pull together information for another department. A quality team doesn’t have to hunt down the latest data. Operations doesn’t have to rely on an email chain to know when something changed. Instead of spending time moving information around, people can spend more time actually using that information to make decisions and get work done.
And when those individual workflows begin connecting across an organization, the impact becomes bigger than saving a few minutes on a task. Information moves more reliably, processes become easier to manage and teams spend less time waiting on one another.
Looking Beyond the Shop Floor
We left IMTS excited about where manufacturing technology is headed. Machines are getting smarter, robotics are becoming more capable, inspection is getting faster and systems are becoming increasingly connected. There’s no question that those technologies will continue transforming what happens on the shop floor.
But maybe there’s an equally important opportunity in looking at everything happening around it.
The emails, spreadsheets, reports, approvals and handoffs may not be the things that draw a crowd at a manufacturing technology show, but they’re happening every day in organizations everywhere. And many of them still exist simply because that’s how the process has always worked.
The future of manufacturing isn’t just about making machines smarter or production faster. It’s also about creating smarter ways for people, systems and information to work together.
Because sometimes, the most powerful automation isn’t the automation you see.
It’s the work you no longer have to do.
