What is Smart Manufacturing?

Smart manufacturing uses integrated, real-time systems to improve factory efficiency and customer satisfaction. It digitizes measurement data on machine tools and shares it with all devices, optimizing data quality and reducing human intervention. This minimizes errors and costs, ensures dimensional accuracy through closed-loop feedback, and reduces human error. The goal is a seamless, adaptive environment that maximizes productivity and minimizes costs.

Smart manufacturing is a topic that is being increasingly spoken about in the industry, as more and more business owners explore the advantages and efficiencies associated with going down this route.

Smart Manufacturing involves the use of systems that are fully collaborative and integrated, responding in real-time to the changing conditions and demands in the factory, as well as about the needs of the customer and the supply network. With that in mind, we are going to look at the importance of smart manufacturing in further depth, including how it is going to drive the manufacturing industry forward.

Digitizing measurement data directly on the machine tool and sharing that data with all manufacturing devices.

Digitizing measurement data directly on the machine tool and sharing that data with all manufacturing devices is going to create a contemporary and competitive factory across many industries. Smart manufacturing is all about optimizing data quality and throughput by the automatic generation of data with greatly reduced human intervention. This will ensure that your manufacturing plant runs seamlessly while automatically reacting to critical data and reducing the impact of worker involvement. Reduction of complexity makes a smart manufacturing plant very effective.

Digitizing data directly on the machine tool.
Collecting measurement data at the machine.

Using closed-loop metrology feedback to provide corrections on the fly allowing manufacturing equipment to be self-adapting.

CappsNC Smart Manufacturing Flow


The most critical goal of manufacturing with metrology feedback is so that parts can be produced that are dimensionally accurate, irrespective of the changing parameters. This is achieved by using closed-loop feedback at the minimum manufacturing costs. Metrology data is the most relevant data about the parts being manufactured.
If you have control over this data, can create it with ease, and convert it into powerful and meaningful parameters, as well as distributing it to the systems where needed, this is ultimately going to make your efforts a lot more efficient and drive down the expense of making parts.

Reduce or eliminate opportunities for human error in the manufacturing process before the process gets out of control.

What is Smart Manufacturing? Avoiding manual mistakes
What is Smart Manufacturing? Avoiding manual mistakes

One of the main benefits associated with smart manufacturing is its goal to eliminate the risk of human error. We all know that humans are susceptible to making mistakes, and these errors can be very costly in manufacturing, especially when they can impact the production process before errors are detected. Processes that are automated, with intelligence delivered to machines electronically, greatly reduce the impact of human errors.

So, there you have it: an insight into smart manufacturing and all the benefits associated with it. Smart manufacturing uses technology and real-time data to ensure that manufacturing plants are running as efficiently and effectively as possible.