INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
We’ll see an explosion of more intelligent, automated solutions from design to production to delivery, driven by the reality that the U.S. has under-produced engineers and labor with manufacturing skills for a generation and will need to maximize human resources.
VALUE CHAIN CONSOLIDATION
There’s a growing shift to value chain consolidation and elimination of intermediaries, both literal and virtual, as manufacturers shorten their supply chains.
HORIZONTAL CONSOLIDATION
Horizontal consolidation, both literal and virtual, is happening as providers combine many old and new manufacturing processes behind consolidated front ends to become more full service.
SMALLER PRODUCTION RUNS
Movements to a larger scale of smaller, targeted production runs, requiring much higher investments in, and levels of, software and hardware automation.
AMAZONIFICATION
We’re seeing an “Amazonification” of manufacturing, similar to IT infrastructure with AWS, as the industry adopts more e-commerce and direct go-to-market models on the front end; and abstracts the manufacturing process to be a more virtual “plug and play” model to customers (i.e., a digital marketplace to offer available production capacity).