Southern Manufacturing 2023 – A reflection

What is Southern Manufacturing?

On Tuesday, I attended the Southern Manufacturing Show for the first time for a few pandemic interrupted years. Southern Manufacturing and Electronics is an annual exhibition in Farnborough that hosts manufacturing component and machine suppliers, as well as a wide range of supporting solutions. I went there full of anticipation and even, dare I say it with my geek hat on, a smidgen of excitement for all the advancements and innovations from the past few years that would be on display. Having a degree Electronic Engineering, having worked for a distributor for Electronic Production machines for 12 years, as well as being the MD of a business that specialises in Manufacturing software solutions, I have more than a passing interest in such things.

Visiting the show

As always, the show organisers at Southern Manufacturing put on a good show from an organisational point of view, the venue was good, access was easy, parking plentiful and the sign-in was efficient.

The Exhibits

There was the usual array of production machines and CNC machines, I’m sure some of which are bigger and shinier than before, all taking CAD inputs to determine what to build. There were also stands showing Internet of Things (IoT) devices, optical inspection machines, 3D printers (with a wider variety of materials and greater speeds than before), there were even a few robots on display, but all the machines on offer are largely doing the same things they were 15 years ago, IoT has been around for a while now and even the robots were general fixed location machines, computer controlled to do a fixed task – the sort of thing that the car industry has been using for years.

My Show Highlight

There were plenty of interesting businesses and solutions on offer at Southern Manufacturing. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best, and this one caught my eye as it is a cost effective to stock take small high quantity items.

Demonstration – TalliScan

A Lack of Innovation

Yes, some of it is now more affordable and accessible to smaller scale manufacturing but there was nothing of what I would consider to be innovation or the embodiment of Industry 4.0, no AI, no autonomous robots and no human implants (although, if I’m honest, I wasn’t really expecting to see any of the latter). With the improvements in accessibility and integration of modern software solutions, I was surprised and disappointed not to see these technologies reflected with innovation of manufacturing solutions.

What is Industry 4.0?

I have written about Industry 4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution before, but in a nutshell, it’s about the use of interconnectivity and smart automation for the rapid advancement within industry.  Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics and improved human-machine interfaces to improve the speed, accuracy and throughput within manufacturing. 

First talked about in 2015 in reaction to emerging technologies, those technologies have moved on immeasurably since then, at a pace that could only have been dreamed of when at the start of the last decade.  AI has become part of our everyday lives with the likes of Siri, Alexa, Google and Cortana being present in most peoples houses or pockets, and many new cars on the market now having a degree of self-drive capability. 

In the business world, we are also seeing Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) making numerous suggestions on related content and being able to dictate emails and letters, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can take item images and suggest appropriate item attributes, as well as take an email and suggest the products that the customer is wishing to order.  In the slightly wider scope, a myriad of tools are now available to detect text, images, voice, patterns in data and even write blogs using Chat GPT (no, I wrote this one myself).

Industry 4.0 Stalled?

So why isn't industry 4.0 actually being implemented by industry? Is industry playing it safe?  Well, the likely answer to that is yes, and for a number of reasons. This will be partly due to Brexit, partly due to Covid, partly due to the current economic climate, there will reluctance in manufacturers, especially small to medium volume manufacturers, to invest a large amount of capital in technology without a good proven track record. This in turn will result in many suppliers being unwilling to invest in the development of such a solution for a reluctant market, and instead continue to tap the tried and tested market.

Then we have the other meaning of playing it safe, and I apologise for using the words now in what would be a mainly manufacturing based audience, ‘health and safety’. I know most organisations will have good processes and policies in place, it is after all an essential part of a manufacturing environment to ensure you are keeping your employees safe at all times, and this is relatively easy when the machines are only told what to do by computers with a fixed and tested program, operated by trained operators within defined procedures and with all the necessary fail safes and safety protocols in place. 

Now what happens when you throw an autonomous robot into the mix or get an AI to make the decisions on the shop the floor. A robot that is free to roam could be more dangerous than the work experience guy, where do you put the safety zone around a mobile robot without restricting its effectiveness, and an AI that works within a tight set of parameters is just a computer program, to get benefits you need these things to have a degree of autonomy. How do you legislate for such autonomy? Could this really be what is stopping the fourth industrial revolution? 

I hope not, these are not unsurmountable problems, and these innovations could be the differentiator to make you stand out in a fairly stagnant market. So please, please can there be some more innovative solutions at next years’ show?

Tom Jenkins

Tom is one of the founding directors of Dynamics Consultants. He has worked on ERP / CRM systems since 1995, initially as an end user and later as a developer/consultant. Before founding Dynamics Consultants, Tom worked in a management role for a machinery importer / reseller, where his work included inventory management and purchase control, systems development, and IT project management.