Future Manufacturing
What will the factory of tomorrow look like? Will people
interact with machines in a different way than they do
now? With a clear intent to look beyond the horizon of
the tried and tested, ANANTABD Research has
wholeheartedly embraced the field of future
manufacturing as one of the most promising and demanding
areas for innovation.
The current market for business solutions for the
manufacturing industry is fragmented and dominated by
small vendors. ANANTABD towers above its competitors
with a broad offering of manufacturing solutions. But
the manufacturing market is in no way static. First, the
amount of information "content" in products is
increasing, ranging from embedded information technology
to simple but critical traceability data frequently
included in today's consumer products. Second, in the
market, there are opportunities inherent in transforming
"industrial workers" into "information workers" by
empowering them with extended information and knowledge
that enhances their ability to perform their jobs.
Tomorrow's Factory
The main characteristic of the future manufacturing
plant will be its connectedness to all its vital
components: workers, machines, and products. Recent
statistics indicate that less than one percent of
manufacturing data is automatically integrated into
enterprise systems. This will change very soon. To
accomplish the automatic integration of manufacturing
data, ANANTABD Research is widening the view of
manufacturing in both vertical and horizontal
dimensions. The ANANTABD Research approach considers the
end-to-end process from the supplier via the plant to
the customer.
In the vertical dimension, ANANTABD Research is looking
at so-called "flexible manufacturing"
(plant-to-business), where automation, manufacturing
execution, and enterprise systems will be seamlessly
integrated into each other. The horizontal dimension
covers two important areas:
- Material flow along the value chain – Adaptive
manufacturing benefits from the increased visibility
provided by next-generation supply chain management.
- Information flow along the product life cycle –
Enterprise-centric product life-cycle management,
extended product information management, and digital
manufacturing are among the topics ANANTABD Research
addresses under this umbrella.
|
