Advanced manufacturing: the pathway to success!

Advanced manufacturing revamps the already existing or create new products, materials and also the process to manufacture these with constituting use of science, engineering and information technologies altogether.

Advanced manufacturing is referred to as manufacturing the needs of present and realizing opportunities in the future with the help of technology and the human mind. The capabilities to build a future that is better and advanced than present is all advanced manufacturing is about! The priorities being building high-precision tools and methods, formulating a high-performance workforce and building innovative business or organizational models to facilitate delegation of empowerment throughout the company’s hierarchy and build process altogether to produce for the future indeed. 

Characteristics of advanced manufacturing

1. Advanced manufacturing production system constitutes the capability and efficiency of mass production with responding to rapid customer demand and desired quality. An advanced manufacturing production system is capable to build a system which is equally efficient if producing for the masses and holds the flexibility of custom manufacturing with responding to different and unique requirements of the market. 
2. Advanced manufacturing is a result of the already existing processes; manufacturing methods with the scope of improvement when realized could be turned into an advanced manufacturing production system unit with breakthroughs in basic science which we popularly term as “intelligent” or “smart”! These advancements and improvements are done through computational predictability and operational efficiency. 
3. Advanced manufacturing production system produces goods and products that minimize the use of resources and maintaining or improving cost and performance. The advanced manufacturing system is formulated for one basic priority set and that is to improve the present conditions, for both the market and the firm. They are needed to be built, formed and found so that they could improve the usage (wastage) of resources, minimize or better the cost and maintain equilibrium in the conditions of input and output of the production system.

Advanced manufacturing: enterprise level smart manufacturing

advanced manufacturing production systems are formulated with keeping in mind and studying the market trends, market nature, and demand nature. The enterprises or firms could take advantage of these market studies and use them to create advanced manufacturing production systems on an enterprise level called “smart manufacturing”! The studies and research could help the firm in developing a well-formulated plan to execute and take advantage of the existing unrealized opportunities. The firms and enterprises with strong-hold over information technologies could utilize data and information throughout the product life-cycle to ensure flexibility in manufacturing processes that would be easy to change in response to the rapid changes in demand at low cost to the firm and the environment. Advanced manufacturing production system or smart manufacturing production system facilitates the flow of information across all business functions inside the enterprise and manage the connections to suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders outside the enterprise.

Advanced manufacturing: the key to sustainable balance in industrial operations

Advanced manufacturing production systems are the very chance of ours at sustainable balance at output and input of resources and products respectively. The wastage of resources like, time, material, money, and labour could be minimalized or also could be eliminated with efficient study and formulation of improved production system according to the unique needs and demands of every industry individually. The time is taken to form and execute this new improvised manufacturing process the resources will not only be saved but also would be used efficiently and effectively. The environment would be harmed no more and the balance of demand and supply in the market could be flexible in accordance with the conditions and the production systems will be flexible enough to adjust in accordance with these changes rapid without wasting resources in bulk.

The trends in advanced manufacturing

1. Semiconductors: semiconductors are significant to the information technology sector and hence huge investments per say have been made by countries as to it is a proven fact that microelectronics is the way for research and development. Also, semiconductors are amongst the very few technologies that could be proven significant in the field of further innovation and development. 
2. Advanced materials and integrated computational materials engineering: advanced material is essential steps required to produce everything from household products to defence-critical applications. The high level of global investment in R&D for advanced materials proves their stories of significance to be true! A relatively new approach to integrating materials information with computational tools, engineering performance analysis, and process simulation holds significant promise for optimizing materials, manufacturing processes, and products. ICME tools enable the development of designer materials for specific applications.
3. Additive manufacturing: Additive manufacturing is a processing technology that exhibits relatively low levels of global R&D today but has the potential to become a platform to shift the entire manufacturing enterprise toward more distributed production models. Creating products via additive processes rather than traditional subtractive ones allows inherent flexibility and customization, contributes to sustainability through decreased materials waste, and presents new and interesting digital supply-chain possibilities for product design and delivery.
4. Biomanufacturing with a focus on synthetic biology: This multidisciplinary emerging technology area introduces engineering approaches 24 of modularization, modelling, and a rational and iterative design cycle2 to molecular biology to exercise precise control over cell functions and products (Koide, Pang, and Baliga 2009). The production of pharmaceuticals via biological techniques also has the potential to simplify the supply chain and produce pharmaceutical products flexible, possibly to the point of creating custom drugs and vaccines. Further, biotechnology could potentially serve as a platform technology for many types of biological and no biological products. 

NOTE: The opinions expressed are personal views of the author.