Smart Manufacturing is transformational, radically impacting the performance of the manufacturing ecosystem through measurable improvements in areas such as: speed, agility, innovation, quality, costs/profitability, safety, asset reliability and energy productivity.
The decision on how to embark on the smart manufacturing journey should align around a strategic vision for the future of the organization. The steps on the journey vary for different organizations with different types of processes and different market drivers so they cannot be easily generalized. But regardless of the strategic business drivers, demonstrable value along the journey is essential to successful adoption and incremental investment required to sustain the smart manufacturing journey.
Undertaking a smart manufacturing initiative and upgrading the manufacturing operations management strategy generally addresses the following broad categories of benefits with the ultimate result of improving profitability which in turn accelerates investments in more innovation.
Productivity and Cost Reduction
The increased automation tied to many Smart Manufacturing projects can achieve great productivity improvements. Improvements that might give your company a competitive edge by raising the bar for price and quality in your market. Automation can reduce cycle time, labor time, and quality errors.
Data coming from monitored machines and processes feed into AI-driven insights to alert of pattern changes and suggest improvement for more efficient use of resources. For example, more predictable inventory requirements can lead to reduced safety buffers, and correlation of process and environmental data can lead to energy cost optimization.
Utilization and Reliability
Information coming out of connected high value machines can reveal asset performance issues and lead to higher levels of utilization and lower levels of production downtime. Predictive maintenance analysis helps prevent unplanned downtime by flagging equipment for proactive maintenance based on usage and performance data. These improvements not only lead to higher business continuity, but they can also increase machine availability for additional production output.
When a key industrial machine goes down, it is usually a whole line that goes down. On top of the repair cost, employees might end up idle, and production schedule might be affected, costing loads of money and unhappy customers. The brand reputation can be damaged, and orders can end up being cancelled.
Quality
It might have been okay to have a few defects in years past, but today’s customer has more access to information, more vendor choices, and is really looking for zero defects.
Smart Manufacturing technologies can be used to monitor quality aspects of the product and process in real-time to reduce process variability, eliminate undetected errors and catch issues as early as possible in the process to minimize scrap and rework costs.
Data with the right context and relation to process and resources allows analysis to dig past the symptoms to understand what is really happening and why it is happening. The additional metrics and insights can help identify human, machine, or environmental causes of poor quality for quicker resolution.
The ultimate benefits of higher quality go directly to improved customer relations with higher brand equity, lower warranty cost, and reduced risk of product recalls.
Beyond Continuous Improvement
The above areas of cost reduction, quality, and utilization improvement through automation and integration might be enough to justify many Smart Manufacturing technology investments, but it would be short sighted for the organization to miss the opportunity for a more strategic look into Smart Manufacturing for digital transformation of the business and ecosystem that yields the following additional strategic benefits.
Transparency, Speed and Collaboration
In Smart Manufacturing, data moves from machine-to-system and system-to-system without human intervention and is available for AI-driven insights and human analysis in near real-time across multiple production lines located anywhere in the world. However, Smart Manufacturing is not just about the data. In fact, many companies are inundated with data from new sensors and enhanced machine monitoring yet not realizing the full benefit from that data.
Transparency, speed, and collaboration are all linked together in the Smart Manufacturing vision. Information flow must be designed for raw data to get contextualized into information and analyzed for insights that are provided back into multiple systems in the manufacturing ecosystem. Insights that drive event-driven autonomous actions for routine situations and enhanced human decisions for non-routine situations.
If the processes in the plant are still bound to paper-based forms, we cannot achieve the desired level of speed and semi-automated processes for Smart Manufacturing. If information sits around on desktops and takes hours or days to get in front of the right person, we are not achieving the desired benefits. The insights need to get to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions. Decisions that will prevent errors, prevent delayed actions, optimize outcomes, and get disseminated quicker into the whole value chain.
Traditional manufacturing plants operate in silos with minimal collaboration or knowledge sharing. Smart Manufacturing gives production lines, business processes and departments improved capabilities to communicate, share data, collaborate, and make improvements regardless of their systems, location, or time zone. These enhancements make it realistic to manage manufacturing operations with more precision and better collaboration among employees, suppliers and partners.
Smart Manufacturing creates an open atmosphere of information-based decisions where decision makers will have the trusted data when it is needed, where it is needed and in the most useful form. Problem solving will not be limited to localized decisions. Instead, problems can be prioritized and tackled based on a total enterprise and ecosystem picture.
Innovation, Agility and Resiliency
Smart Manufacturing systems are integrated with open interoperable APIs allowing manufacturers to quickly change equipment, process flow, product configuration, labels, and packaging. A smart factory is equipped with modular solutions and systems that can easily be reconfigured to scale up or down production, introduce new products, create one off production runs, or create high-mix manufacturing opportunities. This agility makes the organization adaptable to changing demand and more resilient to handle market disruptions.
However, the biggest reward in a Smart Manufacturing strategy comes from leveraging the higher levels of connectivity and information to (a) enhance operating models, (b) provide more personalized product and service offerings, and (c) innovate partner ecosystems to drive higher revenue and customer value.
The increased speed of digital communications and the ability to quickly change product configuration means that we can have increased speed to market for new products and higher ability to capture market share.
Consumers increasingly want direct interaction with a brand and its manufacturing capability. The desire to co-create and customize products applies not only to consumers but also to B2B customers even if it is just a custom label, added feature, or additional product data. For example, Smart Manufacturing solutions can automate track and trace functionality and provide the customers with higher levels of digital data to go along with the product.
Consumers also expect higher levels of customer service and faster response to request for customizations or service issues. A highly connected ecosystem can disrupt traditional supply chains with highly orchestrated processes. Smart Manufacturing can put companies in a better position for partnering and exchanging data in such ecosystems to meet these market demands.
Transformation at a National Level
Smart Manufacturing opens new areas of innovation that will optimize the entire manufacturing industry to create higher quality products, improve productivity, increase energy efficiency, and sustain safer plant floors.
Smart Manufacturing can make US manufacturers more competitive in the global landscape, help towards onshoring more production, and offer the opportunity to boost employment in the US. As Smart Manufacturing is adopted, new technology-based high skill manufacturing jobs will become available in addition to related non-manufacturing positions.
In addition to raising US productivity, Smart Manufacturing is good for the environment by reducing waste of resources and energy consumption. Energy is directly saved as processes are optimized based on energy usage insights, and indirectly saved as waste of resources is reduced by reducing defects, scrap, and overproduction of inventory in a more efficient supply chain.
Even though some energy is created from renewable sources, much is still created from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum). Reducing energy consumption reduces carbon emissions for a healthier planet and improved quality of life.