I had a chance to attend DFM Summit in Brooklyn, NY yesterday afternoon. More information and program can be found here. You can browse program and recording from previous summits. I hope video recording should be available later, so bookmark the link for your record.
The panel discussion called – Cloud Manufacturing. I was delighted to join and moderate the discussion together with Jeremy Herrman from Plethora, Carsten Hochmuth from aPriori and Jonathan Schwartz from Body Labs. You can see more details below.
One of my observation is related to the growing number of companies providing online services to help companies of all sizes and individuals to manufacture products. Think about globalization, connectivity and growing eco-system of manufacturing services. This is where company like Plethora is coming with a service available for engineers inside their CAD system to validate manufacturability and order a part. This is where aPriority cost management system can be helpful to validate cost online. And this is where 3D modeling services like Body Labs can help to create a realistic representation of humans that can be used by manufacturing to support variety of mass-customization scenarios highly demanded by customers today.
My presentation from the panel is here. Below, you can find few slides from my deck speaking about changes in manufacturing, growing trends of globalization, connectivity and cloud services. Together, it creates a potential future for something I call manufacturing network – an online eco-system of manufacturing companies, contractors, suppliers and individuals.
What is my conclusion? Small is a new big. Manufacturing is changing together with growing demand for mass customization and online services. What was possible only for large manufacturing companies 10-15 years ago becomes available for small manufacturing companies. The number of such companies is growing. Navigate to the following Bolt.io blog speaking about growing investment in hardware startups. And the demand for connected cloud manufacturing services will grow too. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
