There's definitely some truth to this.<p>I live and work in a manufacturing town. I've worked for medium to largish manufacturers (500 people), to small ones (~15 people), and a couple in between. There are a lot of opportunities for technology, especially software, to improve these companies. At the moment all of the software that I have seen implemented is focussed on accounting and production management. Office stuff. Very little makes it to the production floor - this is where I think the largest gains have yet to be made.<p>Specifically: AR safety glasses providing real data to production staff, Google Glass style. At some point, I want to be part of making that happen.
I spent a good portion of my career as a manufacturing engineer, so I just wanted to chime in with a few thoughts on the article and the comments I've read here:<p>- Broadly speaking manufacturing can be lumped into to production models: high-volume, low product mix, and low-volume high product mix. Most of the manufacturers that you will recognize from a consumer standpoint are the former, but most of the ones that I've worked for and toured in the local area are the latter. Many automation systems are not cost effective for high product mix mfgrs.<p>- There is a ton of software used in manufacturing - not just at the ERP/MRP level, but all the way down to the production floor. Some of it is COTS, but much of it is custom.<p>- 3D Printing may be buzz worthy, but I don't think it's applicable to most manufacturing operations. Wherever you are while reading this, look around you and count the number of things that could have been made with a 3D printer, and then ask yourself whether 3D printing cycle times (and therefore cost) would scale to large operations.<p>- "API's for Manufacturing" sounds a bit nebulous. When you run a manufacturing operation, there are 4 main drivers for improvement: quality, cost, delivery, and inventory. If you have a single factory producing good on demand via an API, it sounds like a job shop, and would have a limited range of capabilities. If the API interfaced with a network of manufacturing operations, each with its own specialty, then those 4 drivers become significant hurdles.
"And modern supply chains were built around that very premise – that hands were needed"<p>That is quite far from the truth. Having been in many plants, automation is almost everywhere. The pay-back period on automation (Variable Speed Drives, for example) is under a year.<p>If you watch an updated version of the crayon process (<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl1v1m_you-ve-got-crayola-crayons-manufacturing-process_creation" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl1v1m_you-ve-got-crayola-c...</a>), you see how many of those people have been replaced by robots. A fully burdened worker salary (~$70k) can buy you a good deal of robots.
"the formerly painful process of making software has become a mostly drag-and-drop affair"
wat<p>With all deserved thanks to rails and cloud hosting, this is stretching way too far.
I personally think the 2, 12, 20 time frame is too short. Although 2 is probably too aggressive, I really think that this type of movement will happen within the next 5 years.<p>I hope I get to be a part of it.
The "manufacturing things entirely using software" dream died a little for me after I looked at Michal Zalewski's labor of love, the giant "Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting"[1]. The amount of variables in meatspace that you have to account for (that I simply had <i>no clue</i> about) was mind-boggling.<p>[1]: <a href="http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/" rel="nofollow">http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/</a>
Manufacturing is far more complex than most people imagine. I laugh when I see commercials showing craftsmen lovingly making YOUR mattress or some such thing when you know damn well that it looks much uglier and far less custom/manual in reality.<p>Take the task of manufacturing and bringing to market an electronic product. Here's an incomplete list of some of the tasks requiring attention:<p><pre><code> - Schematic design
- Mechanical design
- Plastics
- Machined metal
- Sheet metal
- Wire harnesses
- Optics (for lights, light pipes, etc.)
- Label, decal or printing design (legends, etc.)
- DFM (Design for Manufacturing
- Component sourcing
- Staging according to lead times
- Strategy to ensure long-term availability
- Testing methodologies
- PCB Layout
- Electronic Assembly
- Surface mount
- Through hole
- Manual soldering
- X-ray inspection
- Automated optical inspection
- Device Programming
- Testing
- Packaging
- Packaging design
- Cardboard
- Foam
- Injection molded
- Cut and glued
- Box
- Labels
- International variants
- Regulatory testing
- CE
- TUV
- FCC
- UL
- Other countries
- Mechanical manufacturing
- Injection molded plastics
- Machining
- Sheet metal
- Stamped metal
- Mold making
- Jigs and fixtures
- Software development
- Embedded
- FPGA
- Workstation
- Documentation
- Manuals
- Website
- Brochures
- Support
- Develop testing and methodologies
- Support scripts
- Support systems
- And more...
</code></pre>
The list is not complete of course, but it provides some idea of how complex it can be. The idea of reducing this to an API or solving it via 3D printing is nice, but, today, a fantasy.<p>There are issues that are not obvious from simply reading this list. For example, entrenched systems and software that does not inter-operate. Disciplines that require massively different infrastructures (machine shop, plastic molding, packaging, PDB assembly, wire harness fabrication) and are sometimes islands in and of themselves.<p>Just looking at CNC machining is an example of how arcane things can be and how difficult it can be to change the way things work. CNC machine manufacturers use G-code (which is older than dirt). You'd think that by now this would be a smooth system. It isn't. Software vendors produce tools that require customization for each machine type and, even then, can produce g-code that is actually dangerous to run.<p>I had exactly this experience when I decided that we needed to have our own CNC machining in-house. We bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of (mostly) Haas equipment. All g-code was generated with a CAM tool that ran inside of Solidworks. I'll fast forward to the day that one of the machines --with a 20 Horsepower spindle-- happily churned aluminum with a one inch roughing bit like it was butter. It was amazing to watch, and it sounded horrible. The CAM program simply put out the wrong instructions because the engineers who created it in India decided to have their own creative interpretation of how G-code should work.<p>Anyhow, the point is that manufacturing is hard and complex. That's why you don't see Y-Combinator style "Here's $15K, go start a company" incubators doing real hardware. In the hardware world, outside of the trivial, $15K won't even cover the tooling.<p>Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have Star Trek style replicators. How cool would that be.
It would be good to see something along these lines in printing. It is amazing how much grunt work small print jobs still require for anything more complicated than the smallest paper with simple binding. Give me an API that lets me print up to A0 on different media types, with different options for binding/glueing/finishing.
> the significance rests in the idea that the formerly painful process of making software has become a mostly drag-and-drop affair that has created many billion dollar companies along the way.<p>Dew what? I don't even....<p>Is there a world I'm unaware of that this is true for? 'Cause I'd sure like to know about it!
Link bait title. I expected a new API release, a discussion of existing APIs, etc.<p>"APIs are the future of Manufacturing" or something is a bit better.