1 IoT becomes an integral part of product design
Until now, manufacturing companies have mainly used IoT technology as a supplement. Finished products were equipped with sensors to send information from the periphery of the systems, machines or devices via the Internet of Things. This will change fundamentally in 2018. Manufacturing companies will increasingly incorporate the possibilities of the IoT from the outset and make them an integral part of their product design. The IoT will become the brain of products, sending or receiving data from inside them throughout their entire life cycle. In this way, smart manufacturing will be further advanced, remote diagnostics and remote maintenance will be optimized or assets and inventories will be tracked for more efficient and transparent supply chains.

2. servitization continues to gain momentum
In times of increasingly competitive markets, differentiation and customer loyalty are becoming ever more important for manufacturing companies. Servitization - the addition of innovative services to their products or even the implementation of completely service-oriented business models - is the way forward. Some manufacturing companies are already successfully using digitalization technologies to "servitize" their offering. These include, for example, a mechanical engineering company that uses the IoT to sell its customers operating times rather than machines; or a furniture manufacturer that has expanded its offering to include cloud services for consulting services; or an automotive supplier that no longer just supplies systems for a car manufacturer but also operates its spare parts warehouse based on big data evaluations. These types of models will become more widespread in 2018, meaning that in just a few years, most manufacturing companies will generate more than half of their revenue from services.

3. 3D printing is coming of age
Similar to the Internet of Things, 3D printing will also enter a more mature phase in 2018 and begin to develop its full potential. To date, this technology has mainly been used on a small scale, for example in the manufacture of hearing aids or jewelry. The main obstacles to widespread use to date have been the time-consuming pre- and post-processing and the fact that 3D printers could only produce comparatively small capacities. These obstacles are now increasingly being removed by new, highly innovative 3D printing companies. Stratasys, for example, has developed a solution that combines three printers in one stack. The solution is highly scalable and can produce 1,500 to 2,000 components per day, achieving a level of profitability that will act as a catalyst for the success of 3D printing technology. "Smart manufacturing and service-oriented business models are the two central promises of digitalization to the manufacturing industry," says Peter Schulz, Team Manager Presales at IFS. "In 2018, IoT technology, 3D printing and servitization will become more widespread and thus make a decisive contribution to delivering on these promises. If manufacturing companies want to benefit from this, they need business software that can flexibly support these technologies and business models."

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