Dear Mohsen

In the past century, the industrial manufacturing was dominated by large-scale processes, power hogs such as the fusion of ores and metal machining. Currently, the industrial scenario presents a range of modern techniques that work on much smaller scales, producing computer chips, nano-carbon fibers and other sophisticated products. This evolution towards a more advanced manufacturing technology occurred at the cost of a sharp drop in efficiency - that's what a new study shows. The most hi-tech processes can consume up to one million times more energy and raw materials for a given quantity of end products than traditional industrial processes - a trend that may fail to make efforts to build an industrial economy in the more conscious use of matriais energy use and technologies.

source

Timothy Gutowsk

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dear Mohsen

In the past century, the industrial manufacturing was dominated by large-scale processes, power hogs such as the fusion of ores and metal machining. Currently, the industrial scenario presents a range of modern techniques that work on much smaller scales, producing computer chips, nano-carbon fibers and other sophisticated products. This evolution towards a more advanced manufacturing technology occurred at the cost of a sharp drop in efficiency - that's what a new study shows. The most hi-tech processes can consume up to one million times more energy and raw materials for a given quantity of end products than traditional industrial processes - a trend that may fail to make efforts to build an industrial economy in the more conscious use of matriais energy use and technologies.

source

Timothy Gutowsk

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

See this paper that covers with examples from Malaysia.

Rosnah, M. Y., Ahmad, M. M., & Osman, M. R. (2004). Barriers to advanced manufacturing technologies implementation in the small and medium scales industries of a developing country. International Journal of Engineering and Technology, 1(1), 39-46.

Thanks dear Nelson Elias ,

yes they are all true, but for small and medium companies change is very difficult, taking away old method and technologies may be causes changing their strategies or even human resources, and also replacing AMTs with traditional technologies will be expensive, so they often didn’t take risk.

Dear Nageswara Posinasetti , thank you very much for your suggestion, its very usefull paper for me.

Dear Mohsen. You can use Google Scholar and you should find more such publications.

Dear Thorsten Wuest,

Thank you for your explanation. You right, I’m agree with you. You pointed to a good specification that some companies have; they think they’re good and changes and spending lots of money for adopting new technologies isn’t necessary and they satisfied with current return and performance. Of course todays markets are very competitive and every big company that uses AMTs will be causes its competitive advantage, so other companies motivate to will be in competition. But in some markets and some areas there are few manufacturer that holds the markets. These companies don’t feel to create big changes, they have their customers and what they want. So there is no investment to adopting AMTs and hi-tech. in other hand, some practitioners want to change and they may welcome the use of new technologies, but they aren’t sure that this change is good and profitable, then they can’t take this risk. But some more barriers could be exist that causes implementation of AMTs deal with failure. And I wonder to know this barriers during or after applying the AMTs that lead to failure.

Typical barriers include:

a) Lack of sensitivity by top management

b) Improper ways of quantifying benefits due to AMTs

c) No or little support systems in maintaining AMTS

d) Resistance to "change".

It is NOT the AMT per se but the mindset about AMT that is the main barrier !!

Background: I’ve worked for over 30 years developing and implementing advanced technologies in various industries. For the last 12 years the majority of my time has involved developing and (attempting) to implement an additive manufacturing technology into aerospace industry.

Most of the replies I’ve read here imply that companies are staffed by dinosaurs who don’t like change – it was good enough for great-grandfather, it’s good enough for me. I can assure you that is not the case. While the reasons vary across industries, several stand out in my experience:

Cost – companies are in business to make a profit. You come up with a new manufacturing technology that will displace a traditional method. The company supplying the traditional component cuts the price, often to the point of selling at a loss, to keep their business. Once the new technology is eliminated, back go the prices.

Process maturity and the cost of achieving it. Many parts in aerospace require the use of materials which have published statistical basis design allowables available. The cost of developing the design allowables can run to $10 million or more and require several years of testing.

The benefits of many new technologies are over sold – they are solutions looking for a problem. Two areas come to mind: bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) and additive manufacturing (a subject near and dear to my heart). Both of these technologies are being promoted as the best thing to ever happen, raising expectations of a new revolution. Sorry, it won’t happen. At least without a lot of work.

Are any of these reasons to not develop new technologies or attempt to implement them? No, but you need to understand the pluses and minuses of any new technology you propose. It’s better to under-promise and over-deliver, than the other way around.

Dear Robert Hafley,

Thank you for your descriptions. It was very comprehensive and effective. So your conclusion is that for make decision about develop or not develop new technologies should be consider every new technology characteristics and evaluate - and + of that, then accept or ignore the changes. Therefore, the barrier is minuses specifications of the new technology by itself. ?

Thank you dear Mika Immonen, that was a good point of view, and thanks for intorduce the related articles.

Let’s look at this another way: Is your AMT an incremental improvement over current technologies or is it a disruptive technology, requiring a paradigm shift to enable its use? Many of the discussions I see are related to the latter. It takes an agile company to be able to see the advantages of such technology and willing to make the effort to implement the technology. The companies who aren’t able or willing to make the change typically don’t survive. There are many examples in the computer industry.

As far as incremental technologies go, they may offer an improvement, but is it enough to scrap working, well-understood equipment/processes? Can you guarantee that your AMT is a drop-in replacement for the current technology, that it will perform to expectations from day one? Will it cause bottlenecks in production? A cost-benefit analysis is readily performed on incremental technologies, not so much on disruptive technologies.

Not assigning enough budget to can be one of the barriers for f using Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (AMTs) in manufacturing companies

In manufacturing, success has many fathers whereas failure has a single scapegoat. When pioneering AMT in the organization is perceived as risky, the pioneer will have to share her/his successes with many peers whereas s/he will get all the blame for failures. Only competitive pressure from - typically - start-ups and/or companies struggling to be competitive against the market leader (and therefore have no choice but to gamble) will trigger a broad adoption of AMT. In manufacturing, competition is foremost based on the products, not on the production of those products, which makes access to the market problematic for AMT. Technology only has the gatekeeper position when "not adopting/buying/using it" is perceived as risky and irresponsible behavior. So it is a people/perception and management issue.

Thanks dear Paul,

You did this in good interpretation; success has many fathers and failure has a single scapegoat. I do agree, but I have a question, if imagine one new advanced technology proposed to managers, which is greatly famous and well known but very scarce as just a handful companies adopted that. You think in this situation, what challenges would be occur?

If this 'handful' starts to hurt their competitors, the technology has a chance of being adopted widely. However, this handful has no interest in doing that (hurting the competition badly) when this competition has deep(er) pockets to copy them and adapt this AMT. The handful rather enjoys a big profit margin from their competitive advantage while avoiding to awake the - ignorant - management of the competition. These early adopters only have an interest in encouraging a wider adoption if this creates a big market for themselves (e.g. AMT as a service) and does not invite competitors that turn their high-tech niche into a commodity market (which competes on price and support/sales network size). In IT, Erlang/OTP is such a 'secret' technology giving their users an advantage that they will not advertise more widely than necessary (to attract software developers).

I think one of the advantages of AMT was to save on cost of materials by saving on materials or recycling it. Unfortunetaly it is not happening yet, making AMT not attractive enough at that moment

some of the barriers are:

1.AMT sometimes required the implementation of costly assembly areas

2. not enough studies on the effect of these technologies on the supply chain management for that company

3.expanded studies related to green manufacturing

some barriers:

- trust and confidence in the advanced system

- guarantee of performances (proof) compared to classical approaches

- performance evaluation: ALAPR/GAMAB principle, including costs

- risks taken to implement the new solutions vs. staying with old habbits

- lack of return on experiments, knowledge

- time and cost to put in order the new solutions, return on investments

- lack of standards, norms and inteperability with existing ICT systems

- habbits and usage, nobody to copy/benchmark from

for example, see this issue in the distributed manufacturing control research area:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2009.05.001

hope that helps

regards

Dear Damien Trentesaux, thak you for good points, and also for your paper suggestion. it will be helpful.

Energy still "rules the roost". If a new material processing technique is applicable as a "drop in", saves energy and processing time and improves subsequent in-use performance of the product, it seems quite eligible as an AMT.

Dear Mohsen,

In my point of view there are two types of barriers: 1) certain barriers such as budget, lack of technical knowledge, lack of experts, etc. and 2) uncertain barriers such as fluctuating economic climate, market trends and attitude and other investment risks.

Regards

I see, battle between technical and non-technical staff as the major barrier in addition to the ones mentioned by @S G Deshmukh statement.

Hi Mohesen, This book will give most of the answers on the barriers:

http://www.amazon.com/CIM-Justification-Optimisation-Sev-Nagalingam/dp/0748408584

Hi Mohesen, one more point, this is a well-researched area from late 80’s to 2000. There are many articles even on how to overcome these barriers on implementing AMT, CIM etc. Please search the literature database and you will get a plenty of articles and books.

But whatever, companies / people do, the technical feasibility has to balance the economic reality.

THERE ARE CERTAIN PROBLEMS:

COST

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE

SOME TIME NOT CHEAPER THEN MANUAL COST

IMPLEMENTATION

SERVICE

PARTS

MAINTENANCE

REAL TIME USE

EARLIER HABITAT OF COMPANY AND PRODUCT