Making Soap and Processing Data

My youngest son works at a liquid soap manufacturing facility in Cambridge, Ohio. Sunday evening I talked with him for our regular weekly call and asked about a project for which he is spending a lot of time. He mentioned that most soap factories mix all of the ingredients in large vats and then fill individual containers. He went on to say that his facility is more advanced in that it mixes the ingredients in the piping, does the appropriate cooking, mixes more ingredients, and eventually fills the individual containers. This is a much more streamlined approach where the only bottleneck is at the end.

I listened intently as I had no idea that making soap mirrored some of the data processes I work on at Sony. We have some data pipelines where all of the data is stored together and then cleaned in batches. Other pipelines clean the data as it comes into the system and quickly stores it in the tables that get used for analytics. The advantage of the second method is the data is always up-to-date. With batch processing you have to wait until the batch is processed before you can analyze the data. That may occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly frequency.

I explained the similarities to my son and he further elaborated that in the factory they have real-time monitoring of the systems. This includes flow rates and temperature values for different parts of the process. He asked if we have the same types of monitoring for the data and I responded that we do.

While my son is a Mechanical Engineer and I am an Electrical Engineer, the same ideas can be used in both disciplines with correspondingly similar pros and cons. This reminded me of a class I once took on "Thinking Outside the Box." The course mentioned that you may get ideas for solutions to problems you are working on by simply looking at other seemingly unrelated fields. I can't agree more.

3D Printers

There has been a lot of news about 3D printers and how they are going to revolutionize the manufacturing world. Prices are coming down to the point where you can pick one up for under $700. Of course you will have to assemble it, but that is a lot less than they were even a few months ago.

My youngest son would love it if I purchased a 3D printer as he is taking a robotics class in school and they use a 3D printer to make one-off parts. He uses Autodesk Inventor to design parts. When he is done, he prints them out and has them after a few hours of watching plastic dots get layered on top of each other. 

I don't think the manufacturing world has much to worry about right now as most objects are made from more than plastic. It would be tough to print a new laptop or even a new iPod. About the best you can do with current technology is create a new case for your iPod. Even then, it will probably be very brittle.

I wonder if this will revitalize the hobby kit industry? Perhaps you will be able to buy a kit for a remote-control car that comes with a bunch of downloadable body designs. Perhaps a manufacturer will sell the parts for high-end headphones and then you will be able to print the plastic parts so they fit your head perfectly. When that happens, then manufacturers need to start worrying.