• Business success will depend on aligning knowledge to meet customer needs;
• Customer requirements will pull knowledge into commercial applications;
• Knowledge, skills, and technologies will be sourced from around the world;
• More individualized customer needs will require products and people to service them. Quality of service will be based primarily on communication and design – the ability to translate personal preferences into technical specifications on the one hand and manufacturing and service capabilities into simple, saleable solutions on the other;
• Next generation production systems will rely on new technologies and highly automated production processes – requiring skilled technicians and managers to make things work;
• Highly flexible, reconfigurable enterprises and production processes will demand continuous learning, problem-solving, teaming, effective communication, and creativity on the part of all employees;
• Product and process innovations will be based on new technological capabilities and commercializable applications of intellectual property;
• New technologies and intellectual property will in turn require advances in basic scientific, engineering, and mathematical research, while more attention will be focused on the science of manufacturing; and,
• The effective management of innovation and knowledge supply chains will need to be based on a more advanced understanding of cause-and-effect relationships in theories of business management.

Intellectual property, skills, and experience will be key assets for manufacturers in the future. They are today as well.

Virtual Manufacturing

Virtual manufacturing systems will be extremely agile, but they will also be intelligent. They will not only ensure rapid response, but integrate customers within design, testing, and service delivery.

The manufacturing systems of the future will embody the intelligence of advanced software applications and modeling and simulation capabilities. They will be built around integrated systems of human and artificial intelligence – allowing for the specification, communication, and technical translation of exact customer expectations; the application of machine intelligence, expert systems, and neural networks in production; and the design, coordination, and integration of complex production, logistical, and business systems.

Future production systems are being planned on the basis of virtual engineering and virtual factories:

• Computer automated technologies are allowing manufacturers to combine design, engineering, testing, scheduling, production, maintenance, quality assurance, services, and supply chain management into single processes. Manufacturing capabilities will then depend on the efficient management of information and the rapid translation of that information into production systems.