The Future of Manufacturing  by Patricia E. Moody

from The Technology Machine, How Manufacturing Will Work in the Year 2020, by Patricia E. Moody and Richard E. Morley, The Free Press, 1999

#1.  Technology will drive not only manufacturing, but also social structures and communications.  Expect that technology linkages will replace geography  and family and language affinities that now form "natural" boundaries and communication patterns.  

#2.  Mass production will give way to fully distributed manufacturing and point-of-sale manufacturing (see Figure 2.2).  Mass production and its complex hierarchy of management structures enjoyed a 150-year run.  Watch for industries that uncover the key to localized sourcing, design, and finally, production and reconsumption of recyclable materials, by the consumer and his family, himself.  Manufacturing will become replication at the point of consumption (and design).  What counts are design, time to market, and diversification of type.  Product industries to watch for this kind of process innovation include clothing, recreational equipment, communications gear.  

#3.  The 2020 winners in fifteen years will be small unknowns, unheard of or unrecognized now.  They will come from explosive growth businesses, including hospitality resorts, health and health care management, specialized transport, salesperson optimization, food, small armaments, and security.  These "new" industries' experience will parallel the lengthening of lifetimes and the expansion of personal wealth, and they will thrive on compact data structures.  Instantly available "Personal Health" and "safety" profiles, even diet preferences, will fuel these "mini-industries."  Allowable performance envelopes on systems, much as airplanes have envelopes of performance, will be clear.  Our limitations will be more expansive than expected! 

#4.  The 2020 losers are big, insular companies in the United Sates and Germany.  Obviously arthritic companies - GM and Xerox, for example - whose age spots are showing through their well-structured financials, are predictable casualties.  Less obvious victims include companies such as Microsoft, StorageTek, and Seagate, whose clear technology limitations are becoming inflexible.  

#5.  "Marginal operators" - --uncompetitive producers populated by fewer high-skilled workers -- desperately substitute volume for intelligence:  Concentrating on staying alive in their own geographic areas, their approach to design, marketing, production and logistics resembles the strategy of cast-iron stove producers in the mid-1800s.

#6.  "Mini-industries," short-term, rapid growth and death, single-hit technology winners will replace mammoth industry sectors.  Market segmentation will continue its downward-distributed trend.  The former "computer industry"  illustrates computers have been niched into retail, research, industrial, and academic applications that differentiate their boxes.  Watch for personal transportation industries, personal health, and personal security and entertainment ideas to "customerize," dominate, replicate, and die, all in less than six-months spans.  

#8.  Japan will be a financial, not a manufacturing center.  Pushing, tracking, investing, growing, and harvesting money will more prove more suitable to Japan's lifestyle and cultural affinities.  Software gurus who can solve money pipeline systems challenges will train in the United States and work in Japan.  Expect to see a brain drain as more degreed computer scientists and engineers depart for Japan to develop advanced systems controlling the money pipelines in a country where computers have only slowly penetrated manufacturing and consumer markets.  

#11.  Intellectual capital.  The most important commodity will be people -- not numbers of people, but types of people.  Technical power will rule in manufacturing. in the medical community, in entertainment, and communications.  Ph.D engineers and brilliant software and design gurus will take positions of management and corporate direction.  Salaries of engineers go through the roof, and Dilbert awakens!

#13.  He who lives by the gas gauge always runs with an empty tank.

No successful company will be only "profit driven."  The bottom line - profit, enjoyment, fun, societal benefit - is only the indicator of the successful creation of money, but money can only be created from raw technology and the ability to deploy it.  The alchemy that creates killer apps from thousands of "good ideas" is the key element for growth in the next two decades.  Being profit-driven only, however, won't drive innovation and growth, because being profit-driven means trying to drag the gas gauge from empty to full, hoping for the best.  The alternative is to refuel, because when you have fuel, it does not matter what the gas gauge says.  

#25.  No hands!  Manufacturing sector shrinkage will follow agritech and electronics industries to eliminate hands-on labor cost.  Computers and intelligent systems and few humans will manage manufacturing.  Twenty percent of the cost of new facilities will be computers; most manufacturing labor costs will be for technical support --- engineering, simulators, idea acquisition, just like the way movies and software were produced in the nineties.  Less than 5 percent of the labor base will be working at hands-on innovative replication.

#31.  Television will be dead.  Downloads and uploads through Internet communications boxes will produce customized entertainment/communications.  

#45.  "if you cannot change the world, change yourself!"  Drugs for every possible human condition and situation, from birth through reproduction and death, like plastic surgery, will be widely used among the poorer classes and the super rich.  Drugs - mood changers, personality enhancers, elevators, levelers, violence inhibitors, uppers, downers, energizers, sex aids, death aids, aggression inhibitors - will replace cultural boundaries, church, and families.

#97.  Decide Early and Big.  DNA and aptitude testing will vector kids' future professions and interest, starting at age three.  Because the marketplace will be a maze of niches, aiming children for the right niche and holding to that model of the future will be very important to them and their island.

#99. The gambler will continue to play the game, even when the result is disastrous because it's the game he loves.

We will explain everything, but know nothing. As societies age, they experience analysis paralysis and science illiteracy; they become preoccupied with standards (ISO 9000, and so forth) and analysis -- spreadsheets, DNA code, management options, business strategies, and manufacturing variables and scenarios. Our ability to generate plane loads of data with blinding detail and no organizing structure is crowding our ability to handle true science and real engineering with cause and effect action. Using horoscopes to make executive decisions (a la Reagan administration) is an affront to technocrats, but it is probably just as valid problematically as any other decision method.  In 2020 more analysis will be done on hearsay and anecdotal evidence than rigorous basic analysis. Expect companies to do more and more analysis. Consultants will make more and more money, and the results will be less and less meaningful. 

#100.  The Technocrat King.  Engineers think the electric car and the Y2K problem are either 1) detrimental to the organization (electric), or 2) terminally boring, dull, noncontributory, a non-problem (Y2K).  By the year 2020, the technologist will push back and take charge of which technology tasks must be done, and where, rather than knee-jerk revenue response.  

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Book buddy Dick Morley, winner of the Prometheus Award and inventor of some 30 devices, including the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC),  warned The Mill Girl that what we are looking for is not an "Obamacare of IT" to run the manufacturing enterprise.  "Don't go that big," he said.  But we are in agreement on one point, a combination of hard automation with some origami and a lot of smart IT will take us there.    

When Dick Morley and I sat down to write The Technology Machine: How Manufacturing Will Work in the Year 2020, we were 15 years out from the end date.  Naturally, we envisioned an enterprise connected machine