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How-To: Achieve Digital Transformation for Manufacturing Industry
As SAP defines, Digital Transformation, is a fundamental rethinking of customer experience, business models and operations
Companies are using technologies at hand to come up with innovative ways to improve overall efficiency, deliver value to the customer and increase revenue. Mass customization, at a palatable consumer price point, being just one of the emerging capabilities organizations now have to impress the consumer and increase in revenue.
Digital Transformation is an achievable target but how do you go about it? Below we have outlined some of the considerations for you to deliberate over.
- Define your transformation goals
You should very clearly define what is the objective of your digital transformation strategy and what are you trying to achieve with this execution. What should be the business outcome that you expect from the implementation of this strategy? Quite often the most desired goals range from:
- Monitoring shop floor equipment and resource usage
- Optimization of the available resources
- Manufacturing infrastructure analysis to deliver products in the most cost-effective way
- Monitor insights and analytics to improve plant efficiency
- Quality analysis, SPC and tighter control of the mfg process
…to name a few. Each industry can define its own objectives.
- Awareness of the technology enablers
Once your digital transformation goals are defined you need to select the right platform and long-term partner/enabler who can align their resources to deliver on your set objectives.
For instance,
SAP MII: Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence helps you improve manufacturing operations with real-time analytics.
SAP ME: Manufacturing Execution System gives you the ability to digitally control, monitor, and automate your manufacturing operations to enable a production lot size of one.
SAP’s DM: Digital Manufacturing is a solution to help companies optimize performance, elevate production quality and efficiency along with ensuring workers’ safety. SAP’s DMI: Digital Manufacturing Insights is based on the Internet of Things (IoT), and is integrated with the SAP Cloud Platform to provide holistic analytics across manufacturing operations.
RTS is and has been a certified SAP partner for more than 10 years and has delivered many manufacturing digital transformation projects on the SAP MES platform.
- Aligning the available resources and budget
Organizations need to take the hard call toward freeing up resources and budget to be invested in the pursuit of a better future. In today’s day and age, a company cannot sustain an innovation journey without proper value-based allocation of resources and budget. Infrastructure is another important and vital consideration. Your current IT infrastructure has to be best utilized to meet the needs of the transformation towards Industry 4.0 and do so as efficiently as possible.
- Identify and understand bottlenecks
We understand that your path towards digital transformation and Industry 4.0 isn’t easy. Senior executives, experts, and partners should be engaged to identify probable bottlenecks and roadblocks. A strategy should be developed to counter those hindrances so that the process of transformation is as smooth as possible.
There are extensive amounts of real-time data available nowadays, whether from production equipment directly, R&D, manufacturing, logistics, operations or from customers that need to be synchronized. Manufacturers are increasingly using these data and automation to improve their production processes, to have competitive power and to make safer and better working conditions. To be a smart manufacturer, actually an intelligent enterprise, digital transformation is not an option but a requirement. This is the key to success in the manufacturing industry.
Let us know what sort of challenges are you facing today and we will respond with our ‘best practices’ experience.
RTS Consulting – Automation has been a long-standing partner of SAP when it comes to helping clients achieve insights into their manufacturing operations and transform digitally. Do connect with us for a brief discussion over how we can assist you in achieving digital success.