The world of manufacturing is undergoing
a significant step change. Terms like
Smart Manufacturing, Digital Transformation,
and Industry 4.0 are top of mind for
many manufacturing executives. There’s lots of
new technologies coming together to create
artificial intelligence solutions, digital twins,
digital threads, the Industrial Internet of Things
(IIoT), augmented and virtual reality systems,
and a whole lot more. This smart technology,
along with a lot of smart people, are creating
the fourth industrial revolution and driving economic
growth through manufacturing.
With all this technology coming together,
everyone seems to be looking at it from their own
points of view. This means there’s a good bit of
confusion out there with practitioners not sure
about how all this technology fits together or how
it really achieves the benefits everyone claims.
MESA International, the Manufacturing
Enterprise Solutions Association, is developing a
new Smart Manufacturing Model that will cut
through the hype and the fluff to provide a simple,
easy-to-use model for Smart Manufacturing.
There’s no doubt we’re in the midst of the
fourth industrial revolution, but the size and the
impact of it are still up to us. That’s why MESA
is building this new model, to add even more
power to the revolution and ensure that its
impact is global, substantial, and long-lasting.
A model is typically defined as an abstract
definition of something that exists in the real
world. But a model needs structures to work.
MESA has decided that the highest-level
structure in its new model will be the lifecycle.
This term was chosen because everything has
a lifecycle. Each lifecycle will have multiple functions
defined within it that, when combined, will
provide manufacturers with the complete solutions
they need for their businesses.
Applicability
To make this Smart Manufacturing model applicable
to real-world situations, MESA is also
modeling the interactions between the various
lifecycles and detailing the technology threads
that span across the lifecycles. In the new
model, these threads are referred to as “cross-lifecycle
threads” and “enabling technologies.”
MESA intends for the model to be used
by virtually everyone in the industrial space.
The new Smart Manufacturing model will break
the landscape into manageable pieces so that
everyone can understand the components and
will speak a common language. As such, the
Smart Manufacturing model will serve both as
a reference model and as a pr escriptive model.
By detailing the individual pieces and their
interactions, it will provide everyone that uses
the model with the common points of view necessary
to understand and communicate about
the entire Smart Manufacturing landscape. This
will help industry better evaluate technologies
to ultimately determine how well they fit their
own businesses.
Here’s a list of the lifecycles and technologies
addressed by the model:
- Lifecycles—production, production
asset, product, supply chain, workforce,
order-to-cash.
- Cross-lifecycle threads—quality, compliance,
energy, analytics, security, digitial
twin/digital thread, modeling/simulation.
- Enabling technologies—IIoT, Big Data,
artificial intelligence/machine learning,
virtual and augmented reality, edge to
cloud, blockchain, additive manufacturing,
robotics, and wireless. Whether it’s technology suppliers, manufacturers,
analysts, or engineering companies,
everyone using the model will have a common
language and understanding of the Smart
Manufacturing landscape.
This really is a great time to be in manufacturing
with many new technologies and business
models developing. That’s why there’s excitement
about manufacturing from the C-suite on
down like we’ve never seen before.
The new MESA Smart Manufacturing model
is looking to build on this excitement. It will
help point the way to the future and give everyone
a framework for truly understanding the
value of Smart Manufacturing.
