The Coming Distributed Enterprise: Local, Customized, and Flexible

Additive manufacturing, distributed production networks, and blockchain will combine to create a new manufacturing enterprise model by 2030.   

Predicting what manufacturing will look like in 2030 requires that we look beyond the near horizon and factor in how technology will enable the enterprise. The pace of digital transformation is unprecedented today, and manufacturing is about to experience a sea change. Keep in mind that as technology accelerates, it combines in new ways to further this acceleration. Ray Kurzweil famously describes this as Singularity, where systems are governed by the law of accelerating returns and where intelligent machines live in intelligent networks, and can work autonomously. To better understand the coming revolution, it is useful to first consider how technology has driven production systems in the past.

The industrial revolution ignited economies of scale production that has driven manufacturing organizations for the past two centuries. In the Industrial Revolution, water and steam enabled mechanization to replace artisan manual production. Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford further perfected this by creating the notion of a perfect way to do a job and by having an individual perform the same job over and over on an assembly line. These mass production systems were further enabled by electricity. The cadence of change accelerated.

Later, we introduced electronics and digital tools to remove some of the more difficult, but still repeatable tasks from production operations. Now, AI is enabling the beginning of thinking machines and systems. But electronics and digital technologies didn’t just impact the production floor. They also began to reformulate enterprise operations. Internally, enterprises began to look toward ERP systems to capture and manage production data and to put that data into the context of enterprise needs.