Digital Continuity is The Industrial EQ

Can you see the connection?

• Every cloud has a silver lining and of course, the COVID era has accelerated digital adoption.
• We love working with people who have their finger on the pulse?
• And lastly, the foundation of success is empathy.

To me, these three statements are “joined at the hip”

It was, I think 4 1/2 years ago at an Industry 4.0 Conference in snowy Manchester, England where it hit me.

Amid lots of exhibition stands with vaguely relevant i4.0 connected devices and talks of mere investments of $1000 would make your manufacturing lines i4.0 compliant, I recall when one lady from Bosch in Germany stood for her keynote.

She was filled with passion, energy and hands-on experience. She’d been determined to make something of all this new data, IOT enabled machines and robots. She was determined to create the 1st end to end fully integrated Digital replica of her entire plant. Most around me, thought she’d landed recently from another “unrealistic” planet!

It struck me right there and then – the Digital Twin will become common place, and I thought back then, within a decade.

Back in early 2020, I’d realized there was no chance of this, with the high-level of risk adversity, conservatism, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentalities all around. BUT, then COVID hit and woke most of us up!

Let me now tie in the “finger on the pulse” and “empathy” statements from above:

I for one always love working with people who are passionate, focused and with their finger on the pulse. They always appear to know what’s going on at any given time. They live and breath their world. But the one thing I’ve noticed about these people is that they have empathy for the people in their sphere of influence – they appear to know what they’re thinking and to know what they’ll do next.

After all, how can you “move” people unless you understand their POV and how they feel about something? it has to starts with empathy.

At the end of the day, success is in the EQ, not just the IQ – yes emotional intelligence.

Data – The Industrial EQ

For today’s customers, departments, value chains and manufacturing lines, EQ comes from the data that’s coming your way; be that machine operating data, be that supplier logistics realtime data, be that customer feedback etc etc etc – it tells us how they all are or could be “feeling”

It’s our new digital form of EQ, upon which we can build a successful business.

If you know how your machines, your plants, your departments, your suppliers are feeling at any given time, you can react, respond and adapt to changing conditions and this is solved in only one way – yes, Digital Continuity.

Business contingency plan

One of the lessons learned from the worldwide pandemic is the compelling need for organizations to have a “plan B” in place to ensure business continuity during times of disruption.

The COVID era has taught us that the better plan is to build your processes and operations in a manner that anticipates disaster and disruption. To accomplish this, your organizations require agility, flexibility and the intelligence through seamless realtime data to react and to try new solutions.

These attributes allows your organization to freely move from one mode of operation to another.

Specific individuals, departments or the enterprise as a whole require the ability to mobilize and physically decentralize and maintain operations without interruption or pause.

Operating in silos

In an era of digital continuity, product/manufacturing data is still often managed in data silos of ALM, PLM, ERP, MOM and legacy systems that are only partially, if at all integrated. Secure and efficient access to consistent and up-to-date data over the entire product lifecycle is essential to build a new competitive environment – it’s the Industrial EQ.

Holistic PLM (PLM 4.0) is an enabler for Industry 4.0 because it integrates the development of products, production, and services.

Using PLM 4.0 in collaborative processes has become increasingly important to harness the power of data to foster innovation, make new and differentiated “smart” products, improve supply chains, create new customer experiences, and deliver new sources of value.

The future of new product development is powered by digital continuity – a seamless flow of data that connects your business processes, systems, products and equipment across the value chain to deliver business growth, operating efficiency, cost reduction, resiliency and risk mitigation.

Accelerated NPI

Early in the product lifecycle are activities associated with the way companies discover and create new products. Your R&D teams design and simulate products and production processes virtually, connecting the dots between data and multiple processes and departments.

Digital Continuity helps companies accelerate through the innovation process, through the adoption of a collaborative design platform (3DEXPERIENCE), where teams can simultaneously develop parts of the same product in context of the same goal. This collaboration and connection of data reduces your product development cycle times, optimizes your product and plant design, and automates the decision making.

Reducing your Product Development timeline

• Through the connecting of people, data and processes, you can drive value by speeding design and product testing and by reducing the need for physical prototypes and replace instead with product and manufacturing twins.

Optimize your design

• Your organization can create differentiated products based on data-driven insights.
• You can decrease commissioning time for new lines by validating manufacturing processes prior to physical implementation.

Automate your decisions

• Whenever data is connected via the digital thread, it can be turned into insights that drive results.
• You can predict the impact of product development on key business metrics like demand, cycle time, cost, quality, compliance, manufacturability and supply chain efficiency.
• You can quickly resolve quality, safety and downtime issues by prescribing actions based on real-time production analytics.
• You can run production lines with optimal speed and quality by automating decisions with predictive control models.

Improve your operational excellence

• As your products move at scale into production, your manufacturing and operations teams can benefit from connected processes and data across compliance, logistics, manufacturing, production planning and quality processes.
• The digital thread can add value by improving asset and machine performance, enhancing labor effectiveness, and increasing capacity and yield.

Improve your asset performance

• You can increase uptime with machine health monitoring and smart production scheduling.
• Reduce your unplanned downtime by predicting faults before they occur, and reduce planned downtime with smart maintenance scheduling.

Enhance your labor effectiveness

• The digital thread can help your organization optimize allocation of resources with smart factory planning and scheduling for labor, materials and tooling.
• You can decrease operator training time and improve efficacy with low-risk, high-fidelity virtual reality environments.

Increase your production capacity and yield

• When your factory floor is digitally connected, you can increase production yield with AI-enhanced process control optimization.
• They can minimize production losses by building predictive supply chain models, and they can reduce quality incidents, rework and scraps with predictive analytics.

Improve your value chain

• Digital Continuity can help your organization ensure customer/consumer safety and limit product recall costs by enabling supply chain traceability with blockchain and sensors.
• Improve your inventory management by detecting and evaluating demand in real time, and predict weak points and prescribe recommendations to optimize supply chains.

Improve your product quality

• A closed loop quality process that connects to in-market products can minimize brand risk and decrease the cost of quality and non-compliance penalties by minimizing product recalls.
• Connecting your in-market data back to the product development process closes the loop to improve quality, safety and efficacy for products under development.

Digital Continuity connects your entire business!