Making Manufacturing More “Local”
In a wide-ranging video interview with Machine Design Senior Editor Rehana Begg, Augury Founder and CEO Saar Yoskovitz said the lessons from the global pandemic should be viewed closer to home. Yoskovitz said the need for a more agile manufacturing operation that was driven by the COVID crisis also resulted in a fresh look at supply chain and how machine learning can drive greater efficiencies.
But he also said the emergence from the pandemic creates some important opportunities for a national manufacturing initiative. “It’s understanding how important it is to invest in local manufacturing. And to me, it’s a long-term investment; it’s not just how do we build more factories, but how do we build the right foundation in our education,” Yoskovitz said. “As an example, providing a whole new skill set to a new generation entering the market. Skills that will be required from a maintenance technician five years from now are very different from the skill set that was required 10 or 15 years ago. But our education system hasn’t adapted to that yet.”
Back to “Normal” Still on the Horizon
Depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, you can see the arrival of 2022 as next year, or just nine months away. In either case, it’s the time when manufacturing in particular (and the U.S. economy in general) is expected to unwind itself from the impact of the pandemic.
Consider the findings of the 2021 KPMG CEO Outlook Pulse Survey, which indicate that some of the changes in business during the pandemic—work at home, digital collaboration and changes in the supply chain—will become permanent parts of the business landscape.
According to Brian Heckler, national industrial manufacturing sector leader, KPMG U.S., two themes rank high in people’s minds: “The first is digital business—digital customer engagement, digital ways of collaborating and working within the workforce, and all the knock-on implications of that. The second is reliability—reliability of your workforce to be able to be safe, reliability of your supply chain to be able to deliver what you need when you need it, and the reliability of your systems and processes to be safe for your customer and for your people.”
Digital Precision in Medical Devices
Pressure and competition are growing in the medical device industry. Go beyond complex modern requirements and harness the power of smart manufacturing with operational excellence.
Operational excellence for medical devices (OEMD) allows you to fully control both the process and the product with digital precision. The advantages of control, speed and efficiency will put your business in a strong position to go beyond current constraints and adapt to the future.
A new Machine Design white paper available for download talks about the digital way forward for medical device manufacturers.