Manufacturing

Our life has gone digital. For consumers this is known as e-commerce, mobile Internet and social media to name a few and has long since been part and parcel of everyday life. Now, better known as digital transformation is affecting every aspect in the industrial value chain, from logistics through to production to service provisioning. The industry is confronted with a fundamental change – change that promises growth, prosperity and better resource productivity.

In more technical terms digital transformation is a seemless, end-to-end connectivity of all areas of the economy, and is the way in which the various players adapt to the new conditions that prevail in the digital economy. Along with new tools this will bring fundamental change to many established business models and value-added processes.

New data, connectivity, automation and the digital customer interface are challenging existing value chains. Companies must take a long, hard look at their products and skill sets. And they have to improve their digital maturity if they are to recognize new opportunities, develop suitable offerings and get them to market quickly. 

Manufacturing in particular has always been a business extremely exposed to innovation. Therefore digital transformation represents yet another hugely important and big challenge, but also an opportunity.

5 stars„Put the customer at the forefront of your thinking.“ – customer first, create a unique customer experience – allways maintain a customer-centric perspective. Never forget the customer – start with a pain-point analysis.

This is particularly important for manufacturing companies since the may be inclined to build their new digital journey on their strengths of engineers but overlook the significance of the customer.

Digital Transformation in Manufacturing – 3 pillars

The transformation contains several actions contained in three fundamental areas of change. Developing the business architecture is the key step.

Investment in enabling technologies/ Strenghtening the foundation

IT and technology capabilities are fundamental to drive this change – thus companies are recommended to invest in:

Big data & Analytics environments to capture information and allow better fact/data based decision making

IoT – interconnected machines, sensors – deploy state of the art connectivity including smart sensors

smart machines – implementing interconnectivity between machines

Cloud computing – adoption of cloud techniques in either IT or service delivery

Broadband & connectivity – use state of the art communication technology, eg. 5G

Mobile apps – develop apps with global accessability of products & services

Develop business architecture

Companies will have to (re)think the structure of the business through the lenses of marketing, product, operations and administration.

Refine the approach to customer interaction – creating a unique customer experience. Remove customer pain-points

Developing smart products and services – evolve traditional products and develop new products, services and business models, eg. servitization of the business – evolve towards the „as a service“ economy 

Become a smart factory – by eliminating inefficiencies through the use of better information, achieving end-to-end digital integration and streamlining processes

Predictive/remote maintenance of installed products

Retrofitting of installed base

Use digital technologies to increase efficiency in back-office functions, using advanced analytics, ÁI or predictive forecasting.

Smart energy solution – contributing to cost reductions

Key business process which need to be improved

Build new ecosystem

Companies will need to be strategic about where to play. 

Which ecosystem to focus on (e.g. I 4.0, smart mobility, digital commerce,..) 

What is core competence and done internally vs collaboration with externals

Develop partner network for different competencies (e.g., Machine maintenance/monitoring from machine suppliers, etc...)