Where Should Digital Manufacturing Projects Originate?

Factory of the Future expression — Generated with Bing Image Creator

It’s challenging to keep up with the current technological buzz in every part of personal and professional life. People are feeling dizzy and FOMO for their businesses due to the present marketing frenzy on all social media platforms. Organizations are trying to implement any kind of new technologies under the name of PoC, PoV, MVP, Demo etc. which is expanding the purgatory of digital projects.

Honestly, it’s really easy to lost your track in the bombardment of the new technologies. But manufacturing organizations already have their guardrails to observe their existing operations and define new projects to support, improve or change their operations, which is called Lean Management.

It doesn’t matter how big the impact of technological advancements, current manufacturing organizations do the three main steps: Source the materials, Make the product, Deliver the product. and the main motto for their operations is really simple: eliminate the waste and maximize the value.

Before discussing how to define digital projects, let’s start with explaining key terminologies within Lean Management:

VSM (Value Stream Mapping): VSM is used to examine and visualize the current state of operations. It gives a comprehensive insight of the complete value stream so we can discover potential improvement areas to eliminate waste and optimize operations, eventually maximizing value for the business.
VSD (Value Stream Design): VSD complements VSM by focusing on the future state of operations. With VSD, we can envision how the value stream should ideally look in the upcoming years by considering factors such as emerging technologies, market trends, and customer demands. VSD empowers us to proactively plan for improvements, whether it involves introducing automation, optimizing workflows, or redefining the supply chain. This proactive approach ensures that our manufacturing operations remain competitive, agile, and capable of adapting to changing business dynamics.
North Star: North Star acts as a guiding light for our organization’s operations. It represents the ideal state we aspire to achieve, characterized by key performance indicators (KPIs). If we define our North Star, we’ll have a clear direction and purpose for our projects.

Any organization who embraces Lean Management defined their North Star (what is our ultimate, idealistic future), performed VSM (what is our current status), and VSD (what should be our status in 1-2 year). Then they have clear picture of the business needs, bottlenecks, pain points in their value chain. Now, in addition to known process improvement techniques, we have new weapons under Industry 4.0 to fight against the waste.

It’s always easy to fall into fancy solution trap and try to implement new technologies in manufacturing without solid business needs. But Lean-Managed organizations don’t implement digital projects for the sake of implementing fancy digital solutions. Every digital project should support at least one KPI that is important for the organization; workforce productivity, machine availability, product quality, process stability etc. and KPIs should be tracked closely before, during and after the project implementation to define projects’ effectiveness. As we already know in Lean Management: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

During project definition phase, it’s also important to understand required IT capabilities of these projects and provide standardized solutions to the business. An example could be that one of the manufacturing site wants to reduce unplanned downtimes of the machines. Company might already use MES or SCADA solution to keep track machinery usage statistics and you can embed predictive analytics capabilities into those systems or you can collect data from various systems into new analytics platform and create dashboards and machine learning applications on top of it. I think this can be our another blog post to discuss having modular manufacturing IT landscape to provide necessary capabilities to the business operations.

In general, we should always keep in mind that Lean Management and Industry 4.0 are not completely separate topics in the manufacturing domain. They complement each other to define and solve business needs and to become more efficient and competitive organization.

I’d also like to know your opinions and any experiences you had with the project definition process for Industry 4.0. Share your thoughts via E-mail or LinkedIn!