As organizations manage through ongoing
value chain disruptions that have been
contributing to worldwide inflationary
pressures, many are taking a step back to assess
their supply chain strategies, including the role of
the plant. Organizations are looking deeper at the
adoption of technology and how they connect data
to their people at the right time and in the right
way to stay competitive and drive value.
In a 2021 consumer packaged goods (CPG)
study by Google, digital initiatives—including data
platforms and connectivity—were recognized to have
the potential to unlock US$490 billion by 2023.
Additionally, 90% of top CPG manufacturers are
not yet using digital solutions at scale in support of
workforce augmentation or automation, according
to SmarterChains in a 2020 report. Taking these two
data points together, one can recognize the potential
opportunities and challenges manufacturers must
navigate amid the ongoing need to drive agility and
efficiency in support of operational excellence.
Whether the focus is on driving product quality
and food safety, energy utilization, or increased
production efficiency, one key step organizations
should take is to give teams and individuals full visibility
across operations relevant to their roles. This
gives organizations the visibility and control to be
agile and drive efficiency and collaboration from
the edge to the enterprise. On the plant floor, this
could translate to providing teams with access to
information on their smart devices so that, when
an anomaly is detected, operators can quickly
access cloud collaboration tools and determine
the next steps or call for help. Skills and knowledge
development on the plant floor also becomes more
critical as workers change roles or leave the organization.
New technology that offers collaboration,
skills development, and better ways to handle
abnormal situations can help organizations manage
through skills gaps and spread the knowledge held
by plant floor subject matter experts.
Organizations can further expand awareness
by leveraging trustworthy information, in real
time, structured in a way to bring forward insights
and amplify value. This becomes a stepping-stone
toward an organization’s ability to aggregate,
contextualize, and share its data throughout the
enterprise. Then it can begin to leverage artificial
intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics to support
key drivers like improving productivity and
cost optimization. In the control room, supervisors
could leverage their SCADA applications across a
single or multi-site operation and push data to a
centralized information management system. This
enables organizations to gather AI-infused insights
that support asset management and overall equipment
effectiveness (OEE) for proactive monitoring
and downtime tracking.
Beyond the plant floor and control room, organizations
are looking for new ways to drive awareness
and performance guidance across the enterprise.
Deploying single-pane-of-glass enterprise visibility
is beginning to help some manufacturers uncover
previously inaccessible value by converging engineering,
operations, and other business data in
context. These systems need to aggregate data
from any available data sources, which could include
HMI/SCADA, historians, information management,
IIoT (industrial Internet of Things), ERP,
finance, market data, maintenance, and connected
worker systems. This convergence goes beyond
charts and numbers to provide rich intelligence
that helps analysts and decision-makers respond
quickly to performance-influencing events. At this
level, going beyond a plant-centric view can help
guide strategies to mitigate immediate supply chain
impacts and help organizations plan for the future.
To succeed in the current market environment,
organizations must become more adaptable, agile, and
collaborative and they must ensure that information
gets in front of the right people quickly. Their technology
must align to the needs of their teams and it
must scale and adjust with their businesses over time.
To achieve this, they must continue their transition
toward hybrid (on-premises and cloud) solutions and
software-as-a-service (SaaS) for greater flexibility.
This helps to ensure that organizations achieve longterm
benefits from the technology they employ, and
specifically the software their teams require to be
successful, independent of location or device, from
the edge to the enterprise.
