MCADCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Authentise

By Keith Perrin, VP Agile Manufacturing SW, Authentise

Keith Perrin

At Authentise we’ve gathered some of our team’s views about what we can expect for 2023. We feel we’ve a good record of independent innovation for design, engineering and manufacturing… DRM (digital rights management) for manufacturing; IOT manufacturing device connectivity; AI driven engineering design and manufacturing, Cloud based, distributed, agile, engineering process and workflow management are a few of the innovations Authentise is pioneering.

However, basing future predictions on what’s happened in the past, has always been an idea fraught with difficulty. Sure there are trends we can try to extrapolate. However it’s often the unforeseen that causes movements to tip. This, we feel, has certainly been the case over the past year or so.

• 2023, a digital engineering and manufacturing tipping point?
  
  Prior to recent years marketing for manufacturing industry technology appeared on overdrive. We are in the middle of the greatest disruption since the industrial revolution apparently. It’s been coming for a while.The pandemic started it. Some military operations are accelerating it. New, tech savvy, competitors are embracing it. Now it feels like there’s a rout. In the last year or so, we’ve seen some tremendous disruptions to supply chains, and manufacturing operations that are forcing these ideas to the fore, and accelerating real adoption.As organizations look to move their operations around there’s scope for investment and new, more flexible, resilient, ways of doing things. Now we have a place for all that marketing, and we can start to do things better!
• The increasing march of agile beyond software and into other areas of industrial design, engineering and manufacturing?We predict we’re increasingly going to hear more terms that have so far been restricted to software engineering, being applied to broader engineering challenges.Armed with software definitions of our products and processes then nothing is stopping us from driving the same agile processes we see for software development into other areas of industrial engineering.To pull it off, we’re going to have to think about things very differently from what we’ve been doing. For design and manufacture “the single source of truth”, will need to be considered as more federated sources of truth. This is particularly so against a backdrop of different engineering disciplines and the methods they use. Less stage gate, more integrated scrum teams. Less waterfall, and more CI/CD (Continuous Improvement/Continuous Deployment).
• New tooling for Design, Engineering and Manufacturing starts to show up?
  
  We predict that the time has come for more of our development tools to come together, more closely to better support agile. Given what seems to be an inevitable march to more agile processes it make’s sense that the “tooling” we use for design, development and manufacturing will start to change. Certainly the management tools surrounding some of our favorite design, simulation and manufacturing tools are likely to feel some pressure.What happened in the software industry, with its move to agile provides us with some insight into what we can expect. More focus on the larger picture. More systems thinking. Integrated cross functional development teams. Less silos. More collaboration. More kanban.If we can pull it off, many of the aspirations we have for cross functional ideas (such as “design for X” – design for customer/manufacture/re-use etc), can more readily be fulfilled. This includes some of the biggest challenges we face.
• Now that we’re moving to digital, what are we going to do with it? Moving from zero emissions to zero impact and a circular manufacturing reclamation industry?If all we do with this cool tech is get offerings to market faster or marginally improve efficiently, we think we will be… “very disappointed”.We’re sometimes amazed at how little we’ve been paying attention to the pressure 8bn people are putting on the planet. WHile we’ve been talking about it, we have to ask, Is it enough? Is it focussed enough? Do we really understand what’s going on? And most critically, are we actually doing something about it?We would argue we’re still coming to terms with the pressure too many people are having on the planet. It goes way beyond climate change, the adoption of EVs and supermarkets charging us for plastic bags. Overpopulation is a serious problem that means a lack of resources, generally. This includes the climate, but is not restricted to it. As we increasingly grapple with the challenges ahead of us the more we seem to increasingly understand we’re having to consider more zero impact, circular ideas about the economy.To truly make this work we’re going to have to figure out how we can truly incentivize this idea, commercially, with new business models, offerings and, no doubt, legislation. As we move forward we sincerely hope that 2023 will start to see the manufacturing industry start to embrace this circular idea… as a new thriving segment of the manufacturing industry?

If you’re looking to invest in, and help drive change, for your industrial engineering and manufacturing organization we’d like to hear from you. Find out more about Authentise, at authentise.com.

We wish you and your 2023 endeavors success!

About the author

Armed with a passion for agile engineering and manufacturing, Keith Perrin leads the charge at Authentise to help industrial engineering and manufacturing operations better realize the benefits of digital transformation and industry 4.0.  Authentise, a software platform company providing connected workflow management solutions for the world’s most agile engineering and manufacturing operations.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 at 11:37 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.