Manufacturers Get Smarter On Smart Manufacturing

The concepts of "Smart Manufacturing" have been around for decades, but those concepts are starting to take hold more broadly.   Smart manufacturing is essentially the use of technology to make manufacturing more efficient, reliable and traceable.  Robots were one of the early adoptions, with the accompanying fear that robots would displace humans in the manufacturing process.  We still hear that refrain, but at the same time it is not robots who have taken skilled employees away from the manufacturing line:  almost all of our manufacturing clients cannot find enough skilled manufacturing employees!   More recently, smart manufacturing technology has included broad suites of "Manufacturing Execution Systems" (MES – both cloud-based and on premises solutions) software that enable more efficient and repeatable manufacturing, and broader ability to customize products and deal better with manufacturing quality issues.  Will this intersection of talent shortages and