Global Manufacturing Vault

Do you have a dream? How do you want see manufacturing in a decade from now? Did you try to shout your eyes and imagine what will happen in 2026? 10 years is not a big period of time in manufacturing. But, it is big enough to see a significant differences in technologies and products.

Just think about going 10 years back – no iPhone, no Tablets, no Facebook, Google Docs just started. The speed of manufacturing, PDM and PLM development is much slower if you compare it to consumer technologies. The reality of engineering and manufacturing software is 10 years  adoption cycle. Read more here. But the good news –  engineering and manufacturing software is much “stickier”. Once manufacturing company decided to use a specific software, it will take long time to replace it.

Few years ago, I was blogging about Google Knowledge Graph (GKG). You can find my older articles here – Why PLM need learn about Google Knowledge Graph and PLM, Google Knowledge Graph and future decision making.

At the same time, I found a very mythical technology or product from Google called Google Knowledge Vault. In fact, it wasn’t a product, but a research paper- you can see it here. Google Knowledge Vault supposed to be a successor of GKG. Here is how the functionality was explained by Steve Arnold – long time researching of Google and Search technologies:

“Sensationally characterized as ‘the largest store of knowledge in human history,’ Knowledge Vault is being assembled from content across the Internet without human editorial involvement. ‘Knowledge Vault autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into a single base of facts about the world, and the people and objects in it,’ says New Scientist. Google has reportedly assembled 1.6 billion “facts” and scored them according to confidence in their accuracy. Roughly 16 percent of the information in the database qualifies as ‘confident facts.’”

While Google Knowledge Vault was a only research paper and technologies are moving towards AI these days, it made me dream about some crazy ideas related to manufacturing information spread across multiple network and content repositories these days.

The availability of storage and computational technologies is amazing these days. We can collect, analyze and process large volumes of data. Manufacturing is getting more connected these days. Many sources of information are available online and used by engineers and manufacturing companies.

Global Manufacturing vault can be a store of manufacturing information and global system of record used engineers and manufacturing companies. It can combine relevant manufacturing knowledge and used to plan production, supply chain and operation. The signs of interest in such place is here already – one click manufacturing trend, data-driven manufacturing and others.

What is my conclusion? I admit, Global Manufacturing Vault is my crazy dream. But if you think more, it is not as crazy as you might think about it. The potential of connecting manufacturing into a a network based on information and knowledge is not an impossible endeavor. And remember – back many years ago, Larry Page told his teachers at Stanford that he was going to download the whole internet on to his computer. Of course, his professors thought he was crazy, but a little company called Google might have changed their minds since. Just crazy thought and some historical facts…

Best, Oleg

PS. If you like the idea of global manufacturing vault, please contact me. I’m looking for people who can believe in crazy manufacturing software ideas.

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.