Even ordinary plastics manufacturing plants today have become sophisticated, high-tech operations that require managers to have more skills. Plants that aspire to be great demand even greater knowledge and skill from those making decisions.

It is about to get tougher, as the level of sophistication grows. Our best plants are filled with connected equipment that makes decisions and adjustments with little or no human intervention. Parts are made, inspected and packaged for shipment with a high-degree of certainty they will meet the customer’s requirements.

Every company that makes processing or auxiliary equipment is figuring out how to use these new technologies. Three of the new subject areas are:

• Machine learning. This is a method that allows systems to learn from data and identify patterns. You can see machine learning at work in self-driving cars, speech-recognition technologies and web searches. Most people use it several times a day without realizing they are doing so. It is reshaping our world.

• Artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning is about the acquisition of knowledge. Artificial intelligence is about the ability to apply knowledge. The goal is to simulate natural intelligence, with the machine imitating intelligent human behavior to make decisions.

• Augmented reality. A real-world environment can be augmented by computer-generated information that alters your perceptions. The U.S. Air Force developed the technology in the 1990s, and the video gaming industry quickly adopted it. It is now finding its way into manufacturing.

In the future, the best plastics processing plants will be the ones that embrace these new tools and find new ways to use them. Those that sit back and wait on machinery manufacturers to provide plug-and-play models could fall behind.

IBM created a simulated factory that looks a bit like a tennis shoe manufacturing plant. The online simulation shows a series of possible manufacturing disruptions and demonstrates how the company’s AI computer program, Watson, picks the best course of action to deal with problems such as equipment failure and supply-chain shortages. These are decisions plant managers wrestle with frequently.

Forbes magazine found that applying machine learning improved manufacturing yields up to 30 percent while reducing scrap rates, reduced supply chain forecasting errors by 50 percent and enabled automated quality testing that increased detection rates by as much as 90 percent. Machine learning is also the brains behind predictive maintenance, a hot topic in the plastics industry.

Forbes also has reported on Fanuc’s robotics plant in Oshino, Japan, where robots build, test and inspect new robots at a rate of 5,000 per month. The lights-out-plant, according to Forbes, is a place where “intelligent robots create computerized offspring capable, just like them, of machine learning and computer vision.”

The Fanuc robots making more robots are “smart participants in Industry 4.0: at its core, the linking of the real-life factory with virtual reality,” according to Forbes.

A little closer to the plastics industry, many injection molding machinery manufacturers are offering control systems that can operate most, if not all, of the molding cell. Those control systems use some of these new technologies.

Oden Technologies has new software it says integrates machine learning and artificial intelligence in a production-ready package. The aim is to provide a framework that a plant can adapt to its own specific needs. Oden says the system helps molders and extruders to avoid machine failure, eliminate waste and optimize production.

I predict that these new technologies are going to make our plants much more productive, but they are going to put pressure on managers who must make decisions on how they will be deployed.

Bruce Adams joins PMM

Bruce Adams, a veteran trade magazine editor, has joined Plastics Machinery Magazine as a senior staff reporter. He will work from PMM’s Akron, Ohio, office.

Adams was managing editor of Advanstar’s Automotive Body Repair magazine and collision repair website for the past 11 years. Prior to that, he was an editor at Babcox Media and other Advanstar titles. He was also a daily newspaper reporter for two years.

He has extensive experience in writing, editing, producing video scripts, and developing web content, webcasts and electronic newsletters.

Bruce can be reached at badams@plastics machinerymagazine.com.

Ron Shinn, editor

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