Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Cyber-physical manufacturing makes sense because of all the variables you can plug in

By understanding how many people want to buy an item you can easily then manufacture that amount or more and thereby reduce storage areas of an item that would be needed. Also, you can know more easily the amount of materials and equipment needed to manufacture and to ship your item better. You also could know better what equipment is either down or needs servicing to continue working at an optimum level too. So, cyber-physical manufacturing if done on a large enough scale to warrant the expense of all the sensors you would need built in could be very effective even if you were dealing with multiple facilities manufacturing in multiple countries around the world because all this information could be collated instantaneously at one localized source where the Board of Directors and CEO and CIO might be located.

I can remember automating a warehouse in 1968 at Foremost McKesson which was a drug store warehouse in North Hollywood then when I was 20. We used punch cards so each item had it's own punch card. So, whenever a warehouseman drew an article on an order he also drew a punch card of that item. This way we knew to re-order that product automatically when it was run through an accounting machine by IBM at that time.

So, cyber-physical manufacturing is just taking this same kind of thing up many notches of advancement into a new normal which is quite different than 1968 in North Hollywood where I was working then.

No comments: