Manufacture Digitally

By Jon Sobel

Manufacturers are looking very systematically at everything they do, from the methods they use to make things to technologies like 3D printing and additive printing, all the way to their business models. These large giant factories that have produced things are being broken up and distributed around the worldto become much more flexible.

And they’re realising that as manufacturing becomes more networked and takes on the characteristics of a system, just like in the virtual world, the key to making the system effective and being strategic about it is the data that is generated in the system. And so, in the same way that a bunch of technology companies spent 15 or 20 years hooking everything up and realising, “now we have to use big data to make sense of it”, they are starting to look at all the data that’s generated in production as an opportunity.

First, [they want] to improve the efficiency of manufacturing operations: how do we improve quality? How do we keep our factories running? Next, [they want] to improving business processes and then all the way to business model transformation.

And so, they are investing in using data that’s already there. There’s a huge amount of data on manufacturing that just sits on the floor. One way to look at the market is to see all the people who are touching manufacturing.

And everybody from the software supplier for the front office to the logistics or supply chain provider wants to be able to help the customer understand better what’s going on.

(From “How Big Data and Analytics Can Transform Manufacturing”)

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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