4.0 manufacturing success: the crucial role of people
Sergio Severo
President and General Manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, North America at Lenovo
Industries around the globe are undergoing a profound transformation. New technologies -- with automation, internet of things, analytics and operational architecture being the key ones -- are leading manufacturing toward so-called Industry 4.0.
While the revolution of the industrial production, boosted by advanced digital technology, will lead to greater efficiencies, it will also change traditional production relationships among suppliers, producers, and customers. The role played by humans should change as machines will enter definitely in the process. However, it does not mean a replacement. I truly believe both will coexist in a new format of manufacturing.
Driving digital transformation and the smart manufacturing enterprise requires going from “metrics that matter” to “analytics that matter”, as highlighted in the LNS Research e-book¹. Understanding the "analytics that matter" provides insight on how to adopt a new operational architecture framework to prepare organizations for success.
LNS Research says that operational architecture is a critical component of industrial transformation, once it extends traditional enterprise architecture to holistically manage the convergence of information technology and operations technology. “It’s an approach to align people, process, and technology in context of the value chain, and in support of enterprise strategic objectives,” the e-book noted.
The survey “Manufacturing Transformation - Achieving competitive advantage in a changing global marketplace”² by Oxford Economics, based on a series of related interviews with market leaders, shows that competitiveness hinges on transformation to respond to market shifts and technology trends. According to the study, data and interviews, lasting transformation requires a re-thinking of strategy and planning, an intense focus on creating service-based value, and an embrace of technology-driven innovation above and beyond traditional R&D.
The goal, the paper pointed out, should not only be to “make better things”— creating products and services that meet customer needs and are truly innovative and distinct—but also to “make things better,” facilitating the engineering, service planning and execution, management and production processes through which innovation can evolve from conception to retirement, and creating a closed feedback loop to ensure continual improvement and alignment across the business.
Machines will make industries to get the right data to the right place at the right time to enable data-driven innovation. But humans’ capabilities are the ones to make something useful to all collected data. Oxford Economics stressed that commitment must extend to more than just the C-suite: anyone and everyone that’s involved in making the company better in any way must buy-in to the journey.
As well noted by Richard L. Villars, vice-president for datacenter & cloud at IDC, in a guest post at Hitachi Vantara blog³, automation is a foundation for accelerating innovation and the successful shift to a digital business model requires well planned and orchestrated implementation of existing and new services.
“The threat of disruption due to poor planning or orchestration is particularly strong for organizations that were neither early cloud adopters nor ‘born-in-the-cloud’. Many organizations lack the expertise and resources to execute complex application migrations, updates and launches with the speed and consistency that are necessary for a sustainable and scalable digital services model”, he wrote.
Looking deeply to the undergoing transformation, I’d say the people factor is crucial for the development of putting the digital transformation as a driver for smarter manufactures, through DataOps methodology and harnessing the power of big data.
Although the state of Industry 4.0 is quite different depending on the geography and sector, I believe it is a no-return path. Across Latin America we see some industries going further on its automatization and adoption of IIoT. The report “IoT IN LAC 2019: Taking the Pulse of the Internet of Things in Latin America and the Caribbean”4 found that, although the Latin America and Caribbean’s IoT market has lagged behind from a global perspective, there are encouraging signs, like the revenue growth projected for coming years, and ongoing development trends.
The paper noted that across the LAC region, there are not only IoT platforms and solutions being imported from other regions, but there is also an emerging sector of LAC-based IoT device designers and vertical application developers working on innovative local products and services.
I agree with the authors that the regionalization of locally developed products and services could have significant job creation impact, as throughout the IoT value chain there are demands for a diverse set of skills: design, manufacturing, installation, maintenance, software development, consumer and industry sales, etc.
Indeed, the digital transformation toward 4.0 industry relies on operational excellence with a continuing focus on improvement for technology, processes, and people (employees and customers). The 4.0 manufacturing enterprises are driving success to its full potential, but the people behind them are making the difference.
Links
3- https://community.hitachivantara.com/s/article/Data-and-Automation-Drivers-of-the-Future-Enterprise