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Digital Transformation?
We’ve Got You Covered.

You’re a production manager. It’s nice to be valued, and you enjoy learning new things – and so suddenly you’ve become your company’s ‘digital champion’, responsible for understanding and implementing smart manufacturing technology. And everywhere you look, someone’s giving you a different answer.

Sound familiar?

We understand the pressure of squaring continuous delivery with continuous improvement, and that’s why we’re not going to charge obscene amounts of money to write a lengthy report about everything that needs fixing and nothing about how to fix it. Instead, you can read our no-nonsense guide right here, for straightforward answers and practical information.

The Roadmap

Don’t think of this as a “how to” guide – we know that every manufacturer is different, but we want to make sure that you’re as well-informed as you can be about what these technologies can do for your business and what’s involved in adopting them.

If something piques your interest, give us a call – we’ll always take the time to understand what will help your business and offer you free, friendly advice. Then, if you still need someone to take it off your hands, we’ll help you purchase, install and project manage those new systems – streamlining your processes while you continue to hit those production targets.

Understanding Your Vision

If you’re going to get the best out of technology, automation and data in your business, the first step is to decide what strategic goals you want to achieve. Which of the following benefits are most important to you?

  • Enhanced productivity (otherwise known as “more product out the door”)
  • Process optimisation (or “spending less money to make the same product”)
  • Quality control (or “fewer failed or rejected products at the end of the process”)

Based on which technologies will best serve your short- and long-term goals, we can design an implementation roadmap that includes objectives, milestones, resources and timescale.

Budget Planning and Buy-In

Although many smart manufacturing technologies are rapidly coming down in price, there’s still a significant investment associated with some of the more complex projects. To ensure that the project is viable and works for you, we’ll help to create a budget estimate based on your vision and strategy.

Just as important as budget is buy-in. It’s critical that everyone from senior leadership to employees on the factory floor can see how the new tools will make their lives easier – it takes engagement from across the organisation to ensure these systems deliver their full potential.

Assessment and Readiness

How prepared is your organisation to integrate smart technologies? Do you have clearly structured operational processes, and are any of them already automated? Do you collect and report on data? Do you have robust cybersecurity? How much training will your team need, and are they enthusiastic and confident about the prospect?

A good place to start is by using our Workplace Readiness Assessment to understand where more preparation is still needed. We’ll also visit your site and review your current working environment, to understand where simple adjustments might need to be made to your workstations and furniture. After all, it’s no use paying for hardware if you don’t have the right workbench to install it on!

Use Cases and Pilot Projects

The best advice for anyone introducing new technology to their business is to start small, test and learn. After assessing where you stand and identifying any weak spots or room for improvement, it’s now time to identify specific use cases where we can easily start to adopt smart systems and then run pilot projects to test things practically. This might start with an experiment on a production line, or maybe even a single work cell.

Data Collection and Connectivity

Your pilot project has shown the impact that smart systems can have on productivity, quality control and costs on a small scale. Great news, but what’s next? Good data is key to making the right decisions, and so figuring out how we collect it is the most crucial step before we start to introduce smart manufacturing principles more widely.

In order to capture, manage and use data effectively, we need to identify which numbers are most relevant to the strategic goals you decided in step one of the Roadmap. We then need to standardise how that data is collected, and install connected sensors, devices or other data collection systems that will do so efficiently and safely.

Data Analysis

Although you’ve now collected and stored lots of valuable data, it’s of little use until we can analyse it accurately. Data analysis is the process of inspecting, organising and interpreting data to draw meaningful trends and patterns from the mountains of raw information that your sensors and devices collect. We can then use these insights to help us make informed decisions about where we can be more efficient, and how to optimise your processes.

Simulate and Analyse Change

How do you prove whether or not a change will be impactful, without wasting time and money while you implement and test it? With a comprehensive data set from each of your manufacturing processes, we can now create virtual representations of your production line and simulate how a change would work in practice, without ever pausing production in real life.

Digital twin technology can be used to run experiments and try out different production layouts, work cells or process changes. You can quickly test lots of different solutions to the same problem, determine which will deliver the best return at each stage of the manufacturing process, and even chain together multiple tests to understand which combination of changes will have the biggest impact across your entire system.

Implement Change

After analysing the findings from your experimental simulations, it’s now time to make those recommendations a reality. We’ll develop an implementation plan with steps, timelines, and responsibilities during this implementation phase, keeping the transition as straightforward as possible to minimise disruption.

When we implement any new system, we know how important it is to keep your team involved in the changes, ensuring that they understand why and how new technology will support their work. It’s the secret sauce that keeps everybody motivated and enables new systems to be adopted smoothly. We’ll work with you to ensure that all your team’s HR, health and safety, and training needs are taken care of – and demonstrate how tools like Operator Guidance can complement their day-to-day work.

Scale

As the changes you have made to your operations throughout the course of this Roadmap start to deliver a return on your investment, it’s time to look towards how they can be replicated at every stage of your process, as well as where more significant automation between different areas of the production cycle could create even greater efficiencies.