TRANSCRIPT: IMTS 2016 was truly an impressive show with more than a thousand manufacturing companies exhibiting to over a hundred thousand attendees. CBD Marketing was there to ask some of the industry's brightest minds about hot topics, manufacturing, and beyond.
How will robotics and automation affect the global workforce?
Jessica Morris, Director of Application Engineering, Digital Lumens:
“What we’re seeing from our customers is … they’re looking for more and more integration between systems. They want to maximize efficiency, and they want their systems to talk and integrate in order to maximize the efficiencies that they’re getting out of all of their business operations.”
Andy Brewster, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, IMS Software
“Robots historically have been pick-and-place and in those kinds of automation. We're seeing a lot more applications where people want to put a tool on the end of the robot and they want to do drilling or they wanted riveting or they want to do plasma cutting or something like that.”
What impact will the Internet of Things (IoT) have on your industry and jobs?
Dave Ferguson, President, MIE Solutions
“What I see in the Internet of Things is the ability to do a lot of monitoring. It's an open platform — well, it’s becoming open — and everything's going to be connected, so there's a lot of tools out there, a lot of different companies that are actually monitoring all these machine tools. And with the standards that are coming out as these tools are being monitored, that could feed into an analysis.”
Andy Brewster, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, IMS Software
“Connectivity and connectedness. So, it's all the bits and pieces of the manufacturing process talking to each other in ways they've never been able to do before. So, you've got machines and machine controllers, inspection systems and measuring systems, and quality control systems all of which were kind of islands of information and automation of their own now all being able to connect to each other and talk to each other.”
Where do you see the industry headed in 5 years?
Dave Ferguson, President, MIE Solutions
“Right now, I think you see a lot of robots — but they're not moving robots, right? They are stationary, they’re at a press break, they're at a CNC machine loading and unloading. But it'll be interesting when the robots are actually moving and actually going to pick up the next job, so the scheduling software can schedule which job is run next. Well that raw material is in this corner of the building; the robot should know what that material is, grab that material, and bring to the machine and start producing these parts.”
Andy Brewster, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, IMS Software
“I think we continue to see an increase focused on additive manufacturing and in on hybrid manufacturing. So, processes where there's a 3D printing process followed by a machining process after it. So, we're already seeing a lot of this. I think we'll see more and more of that.”
Sascha Fischer, Segment Manager, Siemens Machine Tools USA
“And these trends — all these three things together: the digitalization, additive, plus robotic will have a huge impact on how we think, how we produce, and how the whole industry is working together.”
Well that's a wrap from IMTS.
We're excited to see what's ahead for the manufacturing industry and the implications that these advancements are going to have in the global workforce. Thanks for watching, and if you want to take your marketing to the next level, give me a call.