Moving towards a smart factory operation, as part of the industry 4.0 journey, has become a core strategic goal for many manufacturing organisations. However, Gartner predicts three out of five smart factory initiatives will fail by 2025, due to a lack of supply chain integration. With so many primed to fail, how can businesses effectively embrace these innovations without running into costly mistakes?
In our recent article, we discuss how connectivity plays a key role for organisations looking to embrace the concept of smart and digital manufacturing to drive operational efficiencies. Technologies such as IoT, AI, digital twin and mobility are allowing this idea to become a reality through connecting technology, data, people and processes.
To leverage these emerging technologies, intelligent integration between production devices, ERP systems, such as SAP, and WMS solutions is key to optimising digital technology. There are some simple steps that operations should be considering, which will make a big impact in becoming more efficient, agile and intelligent.
- Automation – Ensuring automation equipment is integrated into ERP systems, and not operated in isolation, is key to increasing productivity.
- Visibility – It is crucial that goods receipted from production are immediately visible and available for internal teams and customers.
- Business Continuity – Reducing downtime, by ensuring production can continue if key software systems are offline, is integral to keep stock moving through the supply chain.
- Monitoring – Integrated processes for monitoring production line devices to ensure production continues should be considered, alongside alerting users when set thresholds are met.
- Analytics – Production line insights are crucial to not only identify real-time issues, but also improve efficiencies based on predictions from collected analytical data.
Creating a connected production environment that utilises emerging technologies, through intelligent integration, will deliver an agile production operation that allows organisations to navigate future supply chain disruptions quickly and effectively. To find out how, read the full article here.