The business software applications, and the companies behind them, that thrive in the year 2020 may look more like eBay than ERP, according to Dick Morley, founder of the consulting firm R. Morley Inc.

"Programs like ERP [enterprise resource planning] and manufacturing execution systems [MES] are killer applications," Morely says. "But the growth area isn't the programs themselves, but the functions that MES supplies."

eBay, he adds, is successful because "you plug it in and it works. For MES to survive as a killer application, we need to do it the way that Microsoft does word processing, where it just works."

Morley made his predictions about the future of technology at Driving Manufacturing Excellence, the annual conference presented by MESA International, the association representing the MES industry.

While Morley may not be a manufacturing household name, the products he is associated with are central to today's factory. Best known as the father of the programmable logic controller, Morley was a founder of Modicon, now part of Schneider Electric, and is presently chairman of the National Center of Manufacturing Sciences.

Asked to then assess his career and present a vision of where he sees manufacturing, and the systems that enable it. Morley said that we are going to see the end of mass production and centralized factory manufacturing as we currently know it.

"Manufacturing needs reinvention," Morley said. In the future, he predicts we will be looking at more personal manufacturing and fully distributed manufacturing. His vision: everything will be produced in small, fast centers controlled by the Internet. In some respects, we are already moving toward that model.