The Internet of Things - Manufacturing
Yesterday, I met with the Tri-State Manufacturing Regional Group (TMRG) to discuss manufacturing from the groups respective industry perspectives. The group is focused on bringing best practices from industry experts including everything from financial management down to cost controls on company waste. During our meeting "The Internet of Things" for manufacturing came up. David Iyoha from Fortech brought up the Connected Manufacturer or Manufacturing 4.0 is the future of industry in our nation. Under the theme of focusing manufacturer for higher revenue at lower operating cost, we openly discussed our flavor of value to the industry.
After connecting with this idea of an integrated manufacturer and discussing Fortechs' Manufacturing Execution System (MES), I started thinking of the software ecosystem supporting manufacturing production facilities. The interrelated data, separated by concentrated use case, is an interesting topic. Many times we, as consultants, are brought in to look a finite set of challenges. Typically, manufacturing solutions sets are partitioned to disparate processes or a group of individual resources under performing, dragging down the entire operation. Thinking of the end to end production process as a big machine running more or less efficiently based on subset workflows, is a holistic approach similar to a diagnostic check on a car or truck. Boiling up the subsystem effect on the whole brings a new focus on downstream contribution.
Integrated Facilities by Software Solution
Taking a 30,000 ft view of purpose built software solutions is a great way to understand the reasons "The Internet of Things" in manufacturing can be particularly challenging. Depending on the solution, many software offerings can serve dual purpose, acting as a jack of all, master of none when it comes to workflow. As companies scale they tend to leverage what they know as best practice and most cost effective. This type thinking has limited multi million dollar companies from becoming 100+ Million dollar organizations. Starting from front office Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) to back office Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), here is a small scope of software designed to optimize subset processes, contributing to overall manufacturing production.
- MAP- Marketing Automation Platforms
- CRM - Customer Relationship Management
- ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning
- HCM - Human Capital Management
- PLM - Product Lifecycle Management
- MES - Manufacturing Execution System
Throughout the discussion TMRG (Tri-State Manufacturing Regional Group) frame worked how consulting efforts, coupled product knowledge specialists, can contribute to manufacturing best practices. Becoming the subject matter expert on manufacturing 4.0 lies in the execution of integration. Understanding the vast solution set available to any type manufacturer and having software focused verticalization will optimize organizations for higher revenue at lower operating cost.
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7 年It is often how we react to the data than what types of data we get. In a fast paced manufacturing system, lost production time can affect beyond cost. Hence, the "I" in IIOT should be integration as David an Mark point out.
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7 年Excellent points Mark - You are right, Industrie 4.0 / Smart Manufacturing has to be holistic in the approach or you simply recreate the same problems in the cloud.