Tedious manufacturing operations, hours of operational planning, and manual asset allocation were some of the good old days’ concepts. Today, the manufacturing sector has revolutionized completely, and all thanks to smart AI solutions.

As per the trusted sources, the smart manufacturing industries will be the new trend of tomorrow. In fact, the AI-powered manufacturing market is predicted to generate a market value of $3.7 trillion by the year 2025!

Right from unsupervised machines to automated robots and smart business solutions, AI in manufacturing has today become a hot trend of the global market for 2021. The leading manufacturing companies’ executives are readily adopting custom AI solutions to automate human-dependent tasks and bring down the industry’s unplanned downtime.

But, what does the future look like for intelligent manufacturing? Will it progress the way it has been for the past some years, or will it have stagnant growth? Let us know more about it in our blog below!

How is AI Transforming Manufacturing?

Here are the top five ways in which AI is benefiting the manufacturing sector in 2021. You can analyse and implement all or some of these ways to make your manufacturing business more advanced and profitable.

• Smart Designs

The first and foremost way through which AI in manufacturing is becoming a modern trend is intelligent designs. The designing part has always been a crucial yet time-consuming task of the manufacturing industry. The designers have to spend hours or sometimes days to finalize a perfect design as per the standards and customer needs. And, if there were any changes, then that complete process would consume more time. However, the scene is entirely different today!

With the advent of smart AI solutions, the manufacturing designing component transformed significantly. Today, businesses make use of automated systems to create generative designs for their manufacturing operations. The designers only need to enter a few values like tolerance limits, type of the material, manufacturing process, and that’s it. They would get the design with excellent values in minutes.

What else? The smart ML algorithms even eliminate the chances of repeating past mistakes and offer the best points from your past successful projects.

• Automated Quality Control

Another excellent application of AI in manufacturing is automated quality control. It is no surprise that quality has always been the most concerning factor of every industry, especially the manufacturing industry. However, with a human-testing approach, getting high-end finishes and zero error was a challenging task. That’s where AI solutions come to play!

With intelligent and automated AI systems, manual quality control issues also vanished to quite some extent. With unsupervised machines and applications, the manufacturing defects could easily be located while sitting remotely. Any slight change in the material or the process is directly alerted on the worker’s device. Plus, for a new type of error, the manager would get possible solutions, and hence, the time and cost of remediating that mistake are saved.

• Robotics-driven Operations

Who can deny robotics when talking about AI and Industry 4.0? For anyone who has witnessed advanced manufacturing business has always had robots in the first place! The advancement in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has today led to increased use of custom robotics applications in the manufacturing industry.

Right from planning the operational sequence to choosing the right tool, the leading companies are using RPA to create automated assistants for their business. And unlike the common belief of robots replacing humans, RPA applications are doing wonders in improving the overall efficiency and workload for the workers.

Apart from the everyday manufacturing operations, business tasks like customer service and sales could also be automated by RPA applications. All that eventually means more free time and fewer business expenses!

• Accurate Demand Forecasting

Warehouse and inventory conditions like stock-out or piling of old stocks are also significant issues for the manufacturing industry. With manual demand forecasting tasks, the conditions of improper demand forecasting and inefficient warehousing are common aspects. However, if you aim to step into an utterly advanced manufacturing era, those mistakes could not be avoided. That’s where AI in manufacturing comes in!

With intelligent AI solutions, the problems of inaccurate demand forecasting are eliminated quickly. The smart and unsupervised AI-powered machines analyse your past demand trends and then offer the most accurate forecasting for various products as per their demands in the market.

These AI machines even take the latest trends into account to predict the most accurate demand forecasting ensuring maximum profitability and minimum wastage!

• Predictive Maintenance

Finally, we have predictive maintenance as a benefit of AI in manufacturing! Although maintenance has always been a critical part of the manufacturing process, it has been changing for quite some time. For instance, initially, the manufacturing industry used reactive maintenance to repair and maintain machine components. After that, the industry moved to preventive maintenance, where the machine maintenance is done as per the planned schedule. However, both of these maintenance strategies were not capable of predicting the failures well in advance. That’s where predictive maintenance comes to play!

With smart predictive maintenance techniques, manufacturing businesses today can get an accurate failure prediction before they impact the machines. Manufacturing businesses can feed the machine/tool utilization data into the machine, and then the smart algorithms predict the most accurate time of component failure. That means you can save your time and cost of tool replacement by repairing the component in advance. Better tool life eventually signifies better product manufacturing and profitable operations.

Conclusion

So, those were some of how AI has been benefiting the manufacturing industry. To conclude, we can say that AI has not remained a sci-fi concept anymore. Instead, it has become a crucial aspect for businesses to survive and flourish in today’s competitive world. Right from automatically detecting the failures to planning the complete manufacturing process, innovative AI solutions have transformed the core aspects of manufacturing. And with this faster transformation pace, we may see more advanced manufacturing techniques in the coming future. So, when are you using AI in your manufacturing business?