THE NEXT RENAISSANCE OF MANUFACTURING

The move towards digitisation has started in the manufacturing industry, but it requires a certain level of restructuring to adapt to the incoming development. However, this wave of great restructuring is burdened with pitfalls. The article offers an alternative roadmap to digitise the manufacturing value chain of an organisation to make it a genuinely advanced cognitive enterprise.

- Rajesh Gharpure

The recent COVID-19 outbreak, a once-in-a-century pandemic, has resulted in significant economic and structural disruption across the manufacturing value chain. Businesses are gearing up with transformative strategies, termed the great restructuring,' to adapt to this changing environment.

There is a growing focus on end-to-end digitisation to reorganise supply chains from just-in-time inventory to resilient supply bases, developing a flexible hybrid workforce, and digitising operations to make them agile and responsive to fluctuations. These transformative initiatives are being accelerated by the adaptation of Industry 4.0 technologies by manufacturers and the industry.

STUCK IN PILOT PURGATORY

A published statistic shows that 74 per cent of the customers who start their journey towards Industry 4.0 (14.0) implementation are stuck in a pilot purgatory. The usual starting point for any implementation is a very focused point solution. However, after its POC/ pilots, this point solution is tough to be scaled up as it addresses a small subset of the original problem. Clients then resort to implementing multiple point solutions to address the complete problem resulting in several joints in their data visibility layer of the organisation's technology architecture.

VOICE OF CUSTOMER

Clients are increasingly looking at implementing closed feedback loop digital interventions to accelerate their journey from siloed systems across points solutions to pivot their digital maturity towards a holistic digital enterprise ultimately.