Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Bringing manufacturing closer to the consumer can, for many products, make a lot of sense yet, to achieve that, no single company could hope to have enough facilities to serve all their customers worldwide. To achieve this dream will require the ability to delegate production to local factories capable of rapidly reconfiguring to produce a given product no matter what it might be, something that is currently out of reach, yet still tantalizingly close.
In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by Alastair Orchard to look at the future of production where AI, digitalization and smart contracts enable the paradigm of the factory owner-operator who can, by contract, locally produce goods from major brands the world over.
In the episode you’ll learn about:
(0:20) Smart contracts enable distributed manufacturing
(3:09) Resilient production through factory owner-operators
(7:23) What the future of AI-enabled modular factories looks like
About the voices:
Alastair Orchard is the head of Digital Enterprise Thought Leadership for Siemens Digital Industries, working with multinationals to become more flexible, cost effective, transparent, collaborative organizations, and to bring their world-class products to market faster than their competitors. He is also the co-founder and CTO of dimax.cloud (http://dimax.cloud) - a distributed manufacturing platform that cuts the cost, carbon and complexity from supply chains. Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.
Bringing manufacturing closer to the consumer can, for many products, make a lot of sense yet, to achieve that, no single company could hope to have enough facilities to serve all their customers worldwide. To achieve this dream will require the ability to delegate production to local factories capable of rapidly reconfiguring to produce a given product no matter what it might be, something that is currently out of reach, yet still tantalizingly close.
In this episode, host Conor Peick is joined by Alastair Orchard to look at the future of production where AI, digitalization and smart contracts enable the paradigm of the factory owner-operator who can, by contract, locally produce goods from major brands the world over.
In the episode you’ll learn about:
(0:20) Smart contracts enable distributed manufacturing
(3:09) Resilient production through factory owner-operators
(7:23) What the future of AI-enabled modular factories looks like
About the voices:
Alastair Orchard is the head of Digital Enterprise Thought Leadership for Siemens Digital Industries, working with multinationals to become more flexible, cost effective, transparent, collaborative organizations, and to bring their world-class products to market faster than their competitors. He is also the co-founder and CTO of dimax.cloud (http://dimax.cloud) - a distributed manufacturing platform that cuts the cost, carbon and complexity from supply chains. Conor Peick is a Marketing Professional creating forward-looking content for the Thought Leadership team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Conor collaborates with industry experts and executives to produce impactful content exploring the challenges companies face and the technologies that can provide solutions.
