It’s one thing to say that C-suite executives must lead their companies’ smart manufacturing strategies. It’s quite another for them to know what to do and how to do it, especially when they’ve become accustomed to delegating those strategies to their manufacturing, engineering, and IT people.
The first step is to understand how smart manufacturing technologies are transforming manufacturing business strategies. The second is to fashion a vision and a plan to implement the company’s smart manufacturing strategy.
Before starting that second step, it’s critical to consider the lessons learned from those on the front lines of implementing these new technologies.
1. The Smart Manufacturing (R)evolution
Manufacturing is now called “smart” today not because it was dumb before. Smart manufacturing is often portrayed as a revolution, but the technologies have been evolving over the past several decades. The term smart manufacturing is used simply to highlight the numerous technologies, all coming to maturity over the past several years, that connect, streamline, and optimize every step of the manufacturing process.
Through the years, manufacturing businesses have installed a veritable alphabet soup of technology, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), and programmable logic controllers (PLCs), all of which automate and connect manufacturing processes. The ubiquity of such technology is why many C-suite executives might wonder what all the fuss is about over smart manufacturing. After all, they’ve heard manufacturing professionals talking about connectivity and automation technology for decades.
The difference now is that the latest technologies finally allow manufacturers to do much more of what they’ve been trying to do for years with earlier technology. Smart manufacturing technologies include the industrial internet of things (IIoT), mobile internet, cloud and edge computing, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), digital twins, digital threads, artificial intelligence (AI), 3-D printing, RFID, additive manufacturing, and advanced robots and cobots, just to name a few.
Together, these technologies enable connectivity between humans and machines, as well as the business suite and the factory floor. They also do the same throughout manufacturing, from design to delivery and across increasingly distributed and outsourced supply chains.
How companies adopt combinations of these technologies will determine whether a company dies, survives, or thrives.
2. Start with Manufacturing
It might sound counter-intuitive, but in building the business vision and strategy, the place to start is in manufacturing. Too often, companies start a smart manufacturing initiative from a technology perspective – they focus on installing the latest and greatest software or hardware solution. But there are some things that can’t be easily changed, like the way products are made, and the jobs that the operators perform in making those products. Simply pushing new hardware or software into plants without understanding these perspectives is a recipe for failure.
C-suite executives must understand that plant professionals are experts in how to produce their products and how to do their jobs. They know better than anyone in the company what will work and what won’t work, and what’s keeping the factory from producing faster or with more agility or flexibility.
3. Technology Is the Means, not the End
As is typically the case with “business improvement” projects that involve technology, companies declare the project complete when the technology is installed. Often, the IT or engineering team holds a little celebration before heading off to the next project.
But installing the technology is just the start. At that point, no improvements have been made by the business, no additional capabilities have been added, and no cost reduction has been realized. For the business, the project is just beginning when the technology is installed.
4. The Transition Is a Journey
The transition to smart manufacturing should not be thought of as a project with a beginning and an end, but rather as a never-ending journey.
First, connecting the entire enterprise, which often involves connecting facilities throughout the globe, is a massive undertaking that will take years to complete.
Second, the technology continues to rapidly evolve, which continually changes customer demands and, in turn, requires more and different smart technologies. As with the overall business strategy, the need is to update the smart manufacturing strategy to meet ever-changing market expectations.
5. Go Slow to Go Fast
The single biggest failure point in a smart manufacturing implementation is attempting too big an implementation, too fast. This tends to happen for two reasons. First, over-eager manufacturing engineers might push for a multimillion-dollar overhaul. Second, the CEO demands it.
CEOs must resist these all-too-common tendencies. It’s best to identify a problem to be solved with smart manufacturing technologies, implement the solution, then use the return on investment (ROI) to fund the next step.
6. Smart Manufacturing Will Happen with or without C-Suite Leadership
Most companies’ transition toward smart manufacturing is already underway, whether they know it or not. In the past few decades, manufacturing engineers have adopted what are now recognized as early versions of smart manufacturing technologies. Often, they have installed these technologies unbeknownst to CEOs.
What’s happening is that production leaders have problems they need to solve and they’re implementing this shadow IT/OT because the business is not supporting them with the technology and tools they need. So, they go out and solve their problems by implementing technology that works for their situation, without regard for how it might fit in with or affect other plants or the business.
To gain the highest business value from smart manufacturing technologies, C-suite executives must take ownership of their companies’ transitions. They must actively create a vision that is aligned with the business strategy and a roadmap that communicates how to achieve it. That way, when manufacturing leaders need to choose a particular technology to solve a problem, they’ll choose something that fits within the company’s smart manufacturing vision.
Conclusion
Smart manufacturing is having such a tremendous impact across the manufacturing industries because of all the smart technologies now available, and especially because of the synergies between those technologies. But it’s never about the technology. It’s always about the business, about the people, and about the results. And in the end, it’s a journey, not a destination.
Companies are either using smart manufacturing to disrupt the marketplace and gain a competitive advantage or they’re getting left behind. Smart companies will embrace smart manufacturing, use the right technologies, and focus on using those technologies to transform their manufacturing operations, disrupt the marketplace, and gain a competitive advantage. Because if they don’t, it’s a sure bet their competitors will.
Smart manufacturing is transforming manufacturing back into an economic powerhouse. Now is the time to get moving, because smart manufacturing is the future of manufacturing.
Looking for ways to become more agile and adapt quickly to rapidly changing markets and an increasing diverse range of customer demands?
Read The Road to a Smart Factory: A Planned, Holistic Approach.
