A few years back I attended the National Manufacturing Debate at Cranfield University. Industry 4.0 was the hot topic, and the room was bemoaning the absence of a UK equivalent to the German Mittelstand, a manufacturing base dominated by businesses at the larger end of the SME definition. The UK manufacturing base by contrast comprises predominantly of businesses of 50 people or less. This enormously long tail of supply has stymied the effective implementation of Industry 4.0 in the UK. Whilst the big OEMs and their upper tier suppliers have been able to vertically integrate their workflows, the costs to integrate are just too high for the little lower tier suppliers – and this is leaving a large proportion of the UK manufacturing sector out in the cold.
I can personally attest to just how unprepared many of our small manufacturers are to make this leap. I often have need to sub-contract CNC machining. Typically, the local engineering firms I speak to have a couple of VMC’s and lathes – there’s one such firm on virtually every trading estate and they usually have the word ‘Precision’ in their name. But many of them are not even effectively at Industry 3.0, let alone ready for 4.0. The third industrial revolution was the digital revolution. My minimum expectation of a machining company that is digitally capable is that they can take my STEP or IGES file and through standard post-processors automatically generate cutter paths directly into their CNC machines. The best now can offer on-line costing for basic machining requirements. Yet so many still ask for dimensioned drawings - their approach is to NC program each cutter path on the machine. Yes - it’s digital, but barely.
But should we be wishing for the German experience? I don’t believe so. What that vast resource of tiny engineering firms has in abundance is flexibility and a can-do approach that always tries to find a creative way to solve every problem presented to them. They’ve learnt to be lean and agile the hard way as everything they do has to be cut to the bone and they rarely have budget to experiment. But unfortunately, they also must make do – tight margins leave little opportunity to invest either in new equipment or in training. Many machines are decades old and run on DOS based programs and the lack of technological progress means that there is no appeal for younger digital natives, who could help these businesses on the journey to 4.0. So, the sector is left with an aging army of brown coat wearers.
What we need is a version of Industry 4.0 that suits our vast army of tiny manufacturers. One that can be achieved through affordable incremental change rather than one that requires the revolutionary change of green field sites and wholesale re-equipping. But what we need first is a concerted effort to elevate the digital baseline of our manufacturers to a level that I like to call Industry 3.5. A level that can engage the current generation of digital natives enough to want to be part of the evolution of UK manufacturing.
So, what could a UK version of the Factory of the Future look like? That’s the subject of my next blog in this mini series.