Throughout 2023, smart manufacturing technologies, such as digital twins, 3D modelling, and IoT, were used to strengthen the metaverse.
In 2024, Deloitte anticipates that these technologies will be used to ‘scale manufacturing improvements across disparate processes and people’, as well as in their decarbonisation journeys.
While the sector hopes that 2024 will be a much easier year than the last few, gritty realism leaves the industry planning for the worst. Continued supply chain unpredictability, geopolitical uncertainty and rising costs will mean that smart factory technologies such as AI, 5G, IoT, data analytics and cloud computing will be utilised to help provide real-time insights and end-to-end visibility.
Smart factory transformations in 2024 across manufacturing
Tim Gaus, Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, feels that Deloitte’s 2024 Manufacturing Outlook puts smart factory transformations at the centre of what will define the industry over the next year.
“Manufacturing leaders continue making strides in their smart manufacturing transformations. In 2024, we foresee the boom of generative AI, the scaling of smart manufacturing technologies that were experimented with over the past few years – the metaverse, machine learning, vision analytics and others. They will have a core focus on creating a data model that enables scalability as the biggest trends towards making manufacturing processes more efficient and integrated. Through these technology and process enhancements, manufacturers can anticipate a new scale of innovation in 2024, as the industry moves from being simply resilient to being truly agile.”