In the latest episode of the Thomas Industry Update Podcast, Thomas CEO and President Tony Uphoff sat down with Joseph Anderson, vice president of services at the Institute for Process Excellence (IpX). Their conversation focused on the untapped potential in the data that Industry 4.0 technology is collecting.
According to PwC’s 2018 Global Operations Survey, almost two-thirds of global manufacturing companies haven’t even begun their digital journey because they don’t have a clear vision for their digital future. Changing all of your companies traditional practices and processes can be a daunting process.
However, the survey did indicate that 10% of manufacturing companies have been deemed Digital Champions – that is, they’ve established an entire network of digital service and product offerings and have integrated all of their systems back to the consumer.
It may seem like a challenge to know where to even start with your Industry 4.0 journey, but Anderson says the answer to harnessing your Industry 4.0 potential is in your data.
"When you talk about Industry 4.0, you talk about digital transformation or the digital thread or the digital twin, you always hear people talk about people, processes, systems, and data, but the reality is that most only invest in systems,” Anderson explains. "They say they invest in data, but in my experience, typically they put bad data in their new systems. They rarely take the time the time to do a cleanse – a true data cleanse.”
Maximizing the Impact of Your Transformation
In Anderson’s experience, many manufacturing companies think that the starting point in their Industry 4.0 is buying new technology, but this isn’t always the case. Often these companies need to start internally by considering how they can refine their current processes to adopt the advantages that the new technology could bring.
"For most companies, it’s about calibration. It’s about assessing and transforming those legacy mindsets, those legacy processes, and those poor manual or legacy systems in order to deploy a modern business model,” he says.
"To do this requires true investment. It takes time to understand. It takes the knowledge to understand why and what you’re investing in to enable those results, so you have a repeatable product, repeatable services,” Anderson explains. "This really maximizes the ROI, and it allows you to get innovation out the door with guaranteed quality.”
Focusing on the Right Type of Improvement
Anderson explains that companies aren’t quite grasping the type of improvement they need to be making to ensure an effective transformation, and it’s becoming a major gap in Industry 4.0’s impact.
"The one element that a lot of companies tend to get wrong is we have these initiatives called continuous improvement. This is kind of a pet peeve of mine,” Anderson says. "For us, and for most in society, the word ‘continuous’ means you never stop. It’s a complete cycle. You never take the time to pause, measure, and monitor. And that’s what continual means. It means you deploy something, but instead of continuing that cycle around corrective action and not looking to see if you actually added value, continual means pause and monitor.”
The IpX True North Model, he explains, includes that monitoring step. "That allows you to do these microburst improvement projects or these initiatives, measure the value, add new elements to the next phase, and go again,” Anderson says.
Making Your Workforce a Part of the Industry 4.0 Journey
Anderson also explains that your manufacturing processes won’t be the only internal impact Industry 4.0 technology will have; IpX’s True North Calibration expects to impact the workforce, or "internal customers” as well.
"If all you do is turn on a new tool, you don’t really look at that data that you’re collecting,” Anderson says. "It’s the utilization of it — it’s the cleansing of it — where [industrial businesses often] fail.”
"And they overpromise their internal customers. Their employees, their workforce — we look at them as internal customers,” he explains. "For the last 5 to 10 years, we’ve had this promise as a workforce that we’re going to be able to use this data in a way that’s going to make our jobs better. It’s going to make our products better.”
According to Anderson, using data you’re already collecting, alongside employee feedback, will help your manufacturing company keep its promise to the workforce.
"It’s taking the time to look at what your data truly is and how we should use it, the intelligence we can put with that data, the augmented reality we could use in the service field,” he says. "So for us, the data, good or bad, is derived from the input of your people and processes. It’s as simple as that.”
