
APIs for Manufacturing - inmygarage
http://amandapeyton.com/blog/2012/09/apis-for-manufacturing/
======
kerryfalk
There's definitely some truth to this.

I live and work in a manufacturing town. I've worked for medium to largish
manufacturers (500 people), to small ones (~15 people), and a couple in
between. There are a lot of opportunities for technology, especially software,
to improve these companies. At the moment all of the software that I have seen
implemented is focussed on accounting and production management. Office stuff.
Very little makes it to the production floor - this is where I think the
largest gains have yet to be made.

Specifically: AR safety glasses providing real data to production staff,
Google Glass style. At some point, I want to be part of making that happen.

~~~
nickpinkston
Yea, there's a ton of room for better software in manufacturing, but the hard
part is getting them to adopt it. It has all the hard sales problems of
serving restaurants, but without the ease of understanding their problems.
This generally filters the people with experience in manufacturing who are
already set in their ways.

With the rise of hardware startups though, we're seeing entrepreneurs get into
the dirty parts of the system - maybe some will then go on to solve some of
these problems that they personally run into.

~~~
specialist
Last millennium, I wrote software for print manufacturing, eg newspapers,
magazines, books, flyers... Tasks like image positioning, color trapping,
bindery, etc. Super fun work.

Even then, only the biggest clients spent money. Since then -- post dotcom
bust, 9/11, Bush looting of economy, rise of online, decline of advertising,
switch from offset CMYK press to digital composite printing (eg color
laserjet), rise of ebooks -- there's even less money for capital improvements.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can't imagine printers staying ahead of the
phenomenal rate of technical change AND the constantly shifting marketplace.

So I think the print manufacturers have had a pretty good strategy: huge
initial investment and then ride that sled all the way to the bottom.

Anticipating the disruptive near term technologies for all manufacturing (eg
3D printing, mass customization), I just don't see a sizable market for 3rd
party software coming back.

I've half-concluded that smart software/IT investment money would be for in
house development. To out run one's competitors.

------
nhebb
I spent a good portion of my career as a manufacturing engineer, so I just
wanted to chime in with a few thoughts on the article and the comments I've
read here:

\- Broadly speaking manufacturing can be lumped into to production models:
high-volume, low product mix, and low-volume high product mix. Most of the
manufacturers that you will recognize from a consumer standpoint are the
former, but most of the ones that I've worked for and toured in the local area
are the latter. Many automation systems are not cost effective for high
product mix mfgrs.

\- There is a ton of software used in manufacturing - not just at the ERP/MRP
level, but all the way down to the production floor. Some of it is COTS, but
much of it is custom.

\- 3D Printing may be buzz worthy, but I don't think it's applicable to most
manufacturing operations. Wherever you are while reading this, look around you
and count the number of things that could have been made with a 3D printer,
and then ask yourself whether 3D printing cycle times (and therefore cost)
would scale to large operations.

\- "API's for Manufacturing" sounds a bit nebulous. When you run a
manufacturing operation, there are 4 main drivers for improvement: quality,
cost, delivery, and inventory. If you have a single factory producing good on
demand via an API, it sounds like a job shop, and would have a limited range
of capabilities. If the API interfaced with a network of manufacturing
operations, each with its own specialty, then those 4 drivers become
significant hurdles.

~~~
nickpinkston
This is great comment - the "automation systems are not cost effective for
high product mix mfgrs" seems like the crux of the matter to me. Can we create
more flexible/universal systems?

3D Printing claims to do this, but as mentioned it's limited in what you can
do - so that's going to take quite some time to get right (20years).

It'll be interesting to see the ReThink Robotics launch coming up to see if
their system can help alleviate some of these problems.

------
dtap
"And modern supply chains were built around that very premise – that hands
were needed"

That is quite far from the truth. Having been in many plants, automation is
almost everywhere. The pay-back period on automation (Variable Speed Drives,
for example) is under a year.

If you watch an updated version of the crayon process
([http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl1v1m_you-ve-got-
crayola-c...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl1v1m_you-ve-got-crayola-
crayons-manufacturing-process_creation)), you see how many of those people
have been replaced by robots. A fully burdened worker salary (~$70k) can buy
you a good deal of robots.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ok, so I watched them both, and clearly some of the same machines are still
there, it looks like the only guy who lost his job to automation was the guy
who took the molded crayons and put them into the labeler. All the other steps
were pretty much identical.

Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch an
hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my head.
And what you see when you watch more than a bit of that show is that there are
things that are designed to be built by automation, and things that aren't.

So on the one hand you look at things that aren't made to be automated and you
think "Hmm, can I disrupt that market by designing an automated way to build
that widget?" or as the OP wrote you might think "Hmm what pieces need to be
assembled to make an arbitrary widget?"

One of the things that came up in an earlier thread was that you could go
across the street in Shenzen(sp?) and have an arbitrary fastener made. Things
take lots of fasteners, and they are essential to manufacturing, but making
them requires specific tooling for each kind. Can that be automated? Can I
make a factory that will make an arbitrary fastener in small quantities (say
1,000) efficiently or cost effectively? You know steel rod in one side of
various diameters and fasteners out the other. And then what would the API be
to that factory? Select Head, diameter, material, length, quantity? Maybe
finish?

One of the things that mixing sizes on the assembly line would have is keeping
them separate, but have you seen how fast a pick-n-place robot can sort
things? Could you just have a tray full of random fasteners come out of the
anodizing tank and have a robot sort them into types?

Very interesting times coming up.

~~~
kanzure
> Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch
> an hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my
> head.

I also like manufacturing porn, so I made a playlist you might like:

[http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0EB93E6E02E5CF17&...](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0EB93E6E02E5CF17&feature=plcp)

------
guard-of-terra
"the formerly painful process of making software has become a mostly drag-and-
drop affair" wat

With all deserved thanks to rails and cloud hosting, this is stretching way
too far.

~~~
inmygarage
OP here - you are right and I'm sorry if that line came off as flippant,
certainly wasn't meant that way. I was trying to get across just how far the
barriers have come down in the past 15 years or so.

------
lallouz
I personally think the 2, 12, 20 time frame is too short. Although 2 is
probably too aggressive, I really think that this type of movement will happen
within the next 5 years.

I hope I get to be a part of it.

------
Wingman4l7
The "manufacturing things entirely using software" dream died a little for me
after I looked at Michal Zalewski's labor of love, the giant "Guerrilla guide
to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting"[1]. The amount of variables
in meatspace that you have to account for (that I simply had _no clue_ about)
was mind-boggling.

[1]: <http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/>

------
robomartin
Manufacturing is far more complex than most people imagine. I laugh when I see
commercials showing craftsmen lovingly making YOUR mattress or some such thing
when you know damn well that it looks much uglier and far less custom/manual
in reality.

Take the task of manufacturing and bringing to market an electronic product.
Here's an incomplete list of some of the tasks requiring attention:

    
    
      - Schematic design
      - Mechanical design
        - Plastics
        - Machined metal
        - Sheet metal
        - Wire harnesses
        - Optics (for lights, light pipes, etc.)
        - Label, decal or printing design (legends, etc.)
        - DFM (Design for Manufacturing
      - Component sourcing
        - Staging according to lead times
        - Strategy to ensure long-term availability
        - Testing methodologies
      - PCB Layout
      - Electronic Assembly
        - Surface mount
        - Through hole
        - Manual soldering
        - X-ray inspection
        - Automated optical inspection
        - Device Programming
        - Testing
      - Packaging
        - Packaging design
        - Cardboard
        - Foam
          - Injection molded
          - Cut and glued
        - Box
        - Labels
        - International variants
      - Regulatory testing
        - CE
        - TUV
        - FCC
        - UL
        - Other countries
      - Mechanical manufacturing
        - Injection molded plastics
        - Machining
        - Sheet metal
        - Stamped metal
        - Mold making
        - Jigs and fixtures
      - Software development
        - Embedded
        - FPGA
        - Workstation
      - Documentation
        - Manuals
        - Website
        - Brochures
      - Support
        - Develop testing and methodologies
        - Support scripts
        - Support systems
      - And more...
    

The list is not complete of course, but it provides some idea of how complex
it can be. The idea of reducing this to an API or solving it via 3D printing
is nice, but, today, a fantasy.

There are issues that are not obvious from simply reading this list. For
example, entrenched systems and software that does not inter-operate.
Disciplines that require massively different infrastructures (machine shop,
plastic molding, packaging, PDB assembly, wire harness fabrication) and are
sometimes islands in and of themselves.

Just looking at CNC machining is an example of how arcane things can be and
how difficult it can be to change the way things work. CNC machine
manufacturers use G-code (which is older than dirt). You'd think that by now
this would be a smooth system. It isn't. Software vendors produce tools that
require customization for each machine type and, even then, can produce g-code
that is actually dangerous to run.

I had exactly this experience when I decided that we needed to have our own
CNC machining in-house. We bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
(mostly) Haas equipment. All g-code was generated with a CAM tool that ran
inside of Solidworks. I'll fast forward to the day that one of the machines
--with a 20 Horsepower spindle-- happily churned aluminum with a one inch
roughing bit like it was butter. It was amazing to watch, and it sounded
horrible. The CAM program simply put out the wrong instructions because the
engineers who created it in India decided to have their own creative
interpretation of how G-code should work.

Anyhow, the point is that manufacturing is hard and complex. That's why you
don't see Y-Combinator style "Here's $15K, go start a company" incubators
doing real hardware. In the hardware world, outside of the trivial, $15K won't
even cover the tooling.

Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have Star Trek style replicators. How cool
would that be.

~~~
nickpinkston
Yea, CAM is its own kind of hell - with it's pre/post-processors - crazy array
of options, machine-specific GCode and bugs, etc.

A big issue manufacturing faces is that none of the people starting companies
are software guys - all of them are MechE's or something who think hardware
first, so the CAM ends up far worse the controller (probably a FANUC...),
which is far worse than the physical machine - you do what you know.

Certainly, trying to go from CAD --> finished consumer product ain't happening
next year, but we're seeing signs that we'll see that with more simple
processes pretty soon.

~~~
holri
Software can not replace skilled crafts.

Adjusting a CNC machine is very complicated and requires a lot of experience
and skill.

One lesson learned is, that craftmans that learned on shitty old russian
manuel lathes did a lot better on modern machines than the ones that learned
on super precise automated modern western machines.

The abstraction layer between metall and man that modern machines make does
impede the feeling for the process. The feeling and understanding of the
cutting is essantial to make a good cut, weather it is automated or not.

Craftmansship is not automatable, weather it is software engineering or
manfucatoring.

Bad news for some managers and fantasts.

~~~
im3w1l
Even if you are right, a mechanical turk type API might be useful.

------
7952
It would be good to see something along these lines in printing. It is amazing
how much grunt work small print jobs still require for anything more
complicated than the smallest paper with simple binding. Give me an API that
lets me print up to A0 on different media types, with different options for
binding/glueing/finishing.

~~~
Too
This is how most photo shops operate nowadays. You know, the photo shops where
you back in the days used to leave your roll of negatives and come back 1h
later and have your photos developed.

Many of them now have internet services where you can upload a set of photos
and get them delivered to your door within a few days printed in various ways
and binded as a professional book.

~~~
7952
Things are improving fast. But there is still a reliance on physical standards
such as paper size that may have less relevance in the future. Those small
operators also tend to lack good coherent API design. My local still uses a
horrible soap/java system. I am looking for something more low level as in
defining exact paper size, fold points, and gluing etc. Whats the API for
making a popup book, or a cardboard point of sale? My point is that more
established forms of manufacturing lack the kind of accessibility that is
present in some rapid prototyping setups.

------
pnathan
> the significance rests in the idea that the formerly painful process of
> making software has become a mostly drag-and-drop affair that has created
> many billion dollar companies along the way.

Dew what? I don't even....

Is there a world I'm unaware of that this is true for? 'Cause I'd sure like to
know about it!

~~~
lallouz
Are you implying that even very complicated software hasn't become easier to
write over the past 15 years?

~~~
jsight
No, I think he is implying that major software is not a "mostly drag-and-drop"
affair. In some ways, things have progressed and software is easier, but it's
far from drag-and-drop for all but the most specialized problems.

~~~
inmygarage
Perhaps "democratized" would have been a better way to describe it - the point
of that sentence was to convey that you don't always need a huge pile of cash
or specialized equipment to make software these days. Major software
absolutely requires incredible skill, cash, time and craftsmanship. But it is
also doubtlessly cheaper and easier now than in years past. Though that's
another post for another day.

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pdenya
Link bait title. I expected a new API release, a discussion of existing APIs,
etc.

"APIs are the future of Manufacturing" or something is a bit better.

