Advanced Manufacturing Now

In this episode of Advanced Manufacturing Now, the team previews the June/July issue of Manufacturing Engineering and Technology, available to read now on advancedmanufacturing.org. The issue explores the intersection of people and technology, from press brake tooling and setup reduction to evolving chip control strategies. The conversation also dives into the growing role of AI—from engineering design reviews to real-time decision-making—and what it takes to successfully integrate it into modern manufacturing.

In this episode of Advanced Manufacturing Now, Steve Bauer sits down with Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT) Vice President of Technology Ryan Kelly to unpack a unique industry challenge: why breakthrough technologies aren't reaching factory floors fast enough. Plus, a preview of what to expect at IMTS, where the next wave of innovation takes center stage.

From supply chain volatility and geopolitical unrest to workforce challenges and transformative technologies, manufacturers need to learn how to survive—and thrive—in dynamic environments where flexibility is critical. Quickparts CEO Avi Reichental and SME Media's Steve Plumb and Michael McConnell discuss what this means for the industry today and how it could impact the future. Reichental leads Quickparts' global operations, creating components for aerospace, medical and mobility through additive manufacturing. This episode is a recording of the latest episode of Advanced Manufacturing Live. Previous episodes of Advanced Manufacturing Live are available on advancedmanufacturing.org/live. Follow SME Media on Facebook, LinkedIn, X and YouTube to join us live every other Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern Time.

This episode of Advanced Manufacturing Now brings together three Executive Perspectives from RAPID + TCT 2026, exploring where additive manufacturing stands today and where it's headed next. Featuring conversations with SME's Brett Conner, Stratasys' Foster Ferguson, and Brigadier General Beth Behn, we discuss the shift from prototyping to production, the rise of digital supply chains and the growing influence of AI, qualification standards and defense demand in shaping the future of AM.

On December 5, 2022, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a landmark breakthrough in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), producing an energy output that exceeded the laser input for the first time. The success of an ICF experiment hinges on multi-stage lapping and polishing of fuel capsule shells to nanometer-scale finish and devoid of major surface defects. This talk presents our work with LLNL on assuring surface quality of the fuel capsule shells. Rare surface defects, such as deep pits, can severely degrade ICF performance. Exhaustive inspection across multiple finishing stages to detect these defects is both cost- and time-prohibitive. Conventional scalar surface quality quantifiers fail to capture the manifestation of rare surface pits. We investigated novel inspection strategies that substantially reduce measurement burden while retaining confidence in defect-risk estimation. Here, we impose a multivariate probabilistic bound on pit distribution estimation error to determine the minimal number of surface scans needed to guarantee a specified confidence level. This enables reliable assessment of deep pit risk using approximately 5 – 6 scans (a 5- to 10-fold reduction), thereby substantially reducing the inspection time per shell at each finishing stage. These challenges also motivate the need to move beyond reactive, post-process inspection toward proactive, process monitoring methods that can detect and mitigate the process anomalies that lead to these defects. In this context, we leverage generative machine learning methods conditioned on polishing process parameters combined with shell tracking to identify deviations from expected motion patterns that may lead to surface defects. We also introduce a deep learning model that can track the evolution of pit populations across the polishing stages, capturing rare-event manifestations that scalar surface quantifiers miss. Predictive insights from these models inform possible triaging of at-risk parts and more informed process planning decisions. Taken together, these contributions illustrate how integrating inspection efficiency, process understanding, and predictive decision support can advance manufacturing quality control in settings where rare anomalies and high-consequence requirements demand more than conventional approaches. PRESENTERS: Satish Bukkapatnam, PhD Regents Professor, Sugar and Mike Barnes Department Head Chair, Industrial & Systems Engineering Texas A&M University Shashank Galla Graduate Research Assistant, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Texas A&M University Presented by SME Technical Activities Visit https://advancedmanufacturing.org/webinars for more webinars and an interactive experience with visuals.

In this episode of Advanced Manufacturing Now, we speak with Heather Curtis of Tormach and Joe Leonhard of Sheboygan Central High School about how their partnership with the National Coalition of Certification Centers is shaping the future of manufacturing education.

Manufacturers expect levels of tech enablement and automation to more than double by 2030, according to PwC's Global Industrial Manufacturing Sector Outlook 2026. In this episode of Advanced Manufacturing Now, we speak with Ryan Hawk, global and US industrials and services leader for PwC, about the report and what industry leaders are saying about the future of manufacturing.

Wire harness manufacturing is facing rising complexity, tighter timelines, and zero tolerance for errors - yet many teams still rely on physical formboards and manual interpretation on the shop floor. In this webinar, we'll explore how manufacturers are digitizing wire harness manufacturing execution, replacing guesswork with guided, real-time build instructions driven directly from design data. This session will examine where errors typically occur, why they're often discovered too late, and how leading teams are shifting quality upstream during the build process. Attendees will learn how digital execution reduces training time, minimizes reliance on tribal knowledge, and enables consistent, scalable wire harness production. Key Takeaways: Why physical formboards and manual drawings no longer scale for modern harness manufacturing Where wire harness manufacturing errors really originate and how to prevent them earlier How guided, digital execution reduces rework during the build How manufacturers dramatically shorten training and ramp time for new technicians What scalable, repeatable shop floor execution looks like for complex harness builds How to increase throughput without increasing labor dependency Presenters: Andrew Armstrong Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer Henry Lopez Senior Field Applications Engineer Brought to you by: Cadonix Visit https://advancedmanufacturing.org/webinars for more webinars and an interactive experience with visuals.