IMTS 2012: Stay ahead of the competition

The show theme for 2012 is "Be There" and is a call to action for the more than 82,000 industrial decision makers from more than 106 countries who will attend IMTS to get ideas and find answers to their manufacturing problems and challenges, but most importantly, to stay ahead of the competition. Other highlights that are in planning for IMTS 2012 are the Emerging Technology Centre (ETC), the IMTS 2012 Conference, the Advanced Manufacturing Centre, the National Institute for Metalworking Skills (NIMS) Student Summit, and the co-located Midwest Clean Tech 2012 Conference.

The Emerging Technology Centre (ETC) will bring the biggest ETC feature yet – a local motors car, built live right on the show floor, as part of the Collaborative Manufacturing section of the ETC. Local Motors is the first disruptive U.S. automaker to enter the market in decades, and is built on the principle of collaborative manufacturing. The designs for its cars come from an open source design community. There will be two other big features in the ETC: Additive Technology, and MTConnect?, the open-source communications and interconnectivity standard for manufacturing equipment and devices.

Additive Technology will feature the latest advances in this exciting manufacturing concept. These technologies actually "compress time" in that they dramatically reduce the time between design and production and eliminate certain processes associated with traditional machining, such as tooling.