Exploring Cloud Manufacturing Services
By: Ran Katzir
Tags: Design Fiction, Manufacturing, Future Networks, Cloud Computing, 3D Printing

A brief history of the CLOUD

I meet many technical people, some of them are experts in their field, who know roughly what the cloud is, but, they have never experienced how simple it is to develop products with it. The best advice that I give them, is just try it!… build something simple, a web app, or just spin up a Linux server. For those of you who don’t even know how to start, I’ll try to picture what it feels like developing digital products today compared to 20 years ago.

20 years ago, when digital engineers (IT) wanted to upgrade their capabilities, for example when they wanted to upgrade their server farm or storage appliance, they had to convince their manager that it is needed, and then the manager of their manager. Afterwards, they had to convince procurement why their preferred supplier is better than its competitors, they might even have to go for a tender process… and then they had to beg finance to allocate budget for it, and then they had to work with legal for a few months to agree on a contract, and finally they had to wait three to six months for the appliance to arrive, whilst trying to free some physical space for it in the meantime, upgrade their electrical and cooling infrastructure and train their stuff… and eventually, they’ve just decided that they won’t. Because it was too damn hard. And innovation stopped. Without IT innovation, the company had to spend more time on manual work and fixing errors and more money on maintaining expensive legacy hardware… If you are working in the manufacturing space, I bet you can relate to this story. Replace the server farm with CNC or 3D printer machine, replace storage with a modern warehouse and sophisticated inventory tracking, and you will understand why manufacturers today struggle with introducing new manufacturing techniques and why developing a new physical product is so hard.

So what do digital engineers do today? They just use the cloud! They have immediate access to hundreds of services and they can scale their infrastructure to support billions of users with a click of a button. They don’t have to worry about upgrades, uptime, or upfront cost. They can set up a whole infrastructure, and delete it after a few hours. And they are doing this while working from home, drinking their favourite hot chocolate.

It’s also worth explaining the revolution that digital technology went through in the last 20 years. As someone who has experience in both spaces, it’s amazing to look back and see how it happened relatively quickly and who did it.

For 35 years IT relied on companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle to supply IT hardware and software to enterprise organisations. It was expensive, prices went up every year, and companies had to pay annual fees of 20% just for standard upgrades and security patches.

And then came Amazon and Salesforce with a different model, what today we call IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (Software as a service). Instead of buying a product, you subscribe to a service. There is no upfront cost, you can invest in innovation and building your product, and the big guys will take care of the rest. And with that, they managed to achieve the ultimate goal: both Lean and Agile!

Why Cloud started with Amazon and Google and not IBM and Microsoft is an interesting topic which I won’t cover here, but there are definitely lessons there for Cloud Manufacturing Services.

Cloud Manufacturing Services

Cloud Manufacturing Services is an idea and a vision. Although there are some manufacturing services which are available online today, they are not integrated and complete. It’s similar to how twenty years ago there were many companies who offered servers and web hosting; it worked and it proved the concept but there is a big leap of service from hosting of servers to the cloud as we know it today.

The best way which I could think of illustrating the vision is by presenting a sample dashboard which includes multiple manufacturing services. When these services are integrated together they can be used to design, develop and manufacture “smart” electronic products (or IoT). The process which I am using here is called Design Fiction, a design practice aimed at exploring and criticising possible futures by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artefacts. Here it is…

As you can see, the dashboard (which resembles a very popular Cloud provider) includes around 50 digitally-defined manufacturing services. When selecting a service, a standard template on how to use them appears:

Complete input kit definition: What is needed to start the service.

Variables and options to choose from: i.e. materials, quantity, colour…

A pricing equation: How much each job is going to cost based on size, weight, quantity, etc…

Inspection / Test procedure: To verify that the output conforms to the required standards.

Tag and names to compose this service into software-defined manufacturing pipelines.

API which implements this functionality and potentially Manufacturing as Code (MaC) script interface.

Documentation on how to use the service

Let’s go through the dashboard and see an example of how this platform can be used to set up a manufacturing pipeline for a Raspberry Pi kit: