Pillar Description: Manufacturers are faced with a skills shortage, so it’s imperative that the workforce is empowered with the tools and information they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. This applies to the operators, technicians, and supervisors working in the facility. Digital empowerment can also support operations support personnel doing scheduling, maintenance, and continuous improvement as well as others in the offices in supply chain, engineering, development, sales, marketing, and finance.

Question: How well does your company perform at sharing best practices?

Your answer: Good 1. Good news that you have some capability to share best practices. Keep improving your processes and systems to encourage excellent best practice sharing. Making it more standard, systematic, or easy to access might be good starting points.

Question: How well does your company perform at collaborating among teams?

Your answer: Fair 2. We recommend you ask a few questions: How might you improve your collaboration? What is keeping you from being in the top tiers for this crucial element for improving operations? Are there issues with mindsets, incentives, processes, or software that prevent world-class collaboration? Identify and resource a project that would help you address one or more of those issues.

Question: Which of the following groups typically have easy access to the plant data they need to do their jobs?

3. Plant Personnel (i.e., operators, technicians, supervisors):
Your answer: False
We recommend you create a project to empower your frontline operations workers with the data they need. Start by identifying one process or data set that might help you alleviate the challenge(s) of visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep.

Operations Support personnel (i.e., schedulers, maintenance leads, manufacturing engineers, quality, continuous improvement):
Your answer: True
It's outstanding that your quality, maintenance, scneduling, and related staff have the information they need accessible. This can help you to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement, and improve overall outcomes.

Office Personnel (i.e., procurement, planning, finance, product engineering, sales, marketing):
Your answer: True
It's fantastic that your office staff have the information they need accessible from the operation. This can help you to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement, and improve overall outcomes.

Best Practices: No matter how sophisticated or automated a manufacturer becomes, the employees are crucial to success with manufacturing operations. Employees from the shop floor to the top floor should be empowered to do what is best for the company at any time. Top Performers are over three times as likely to be excellent at sharing best practices and collaborating easily across disciplines or teams.

Pillar Description: Industry 4.0 is a strategy to use decentralized information to manage operations proactively across an enterprise and value chain. The objective is to optimize resources, processes and outcomes for profitable, quick response. We use this term to cover a range of visions such as Smart Manufacturing, Digital Transformation, and others. Industry 4.0 creates the "Smart Connected Factory" with supporting technologies such as automation, IoT, cloud computing, and MES.

Question: Which of the following best describes your status in the Industry 4.0 journey?

Your answer: Getting started with one project 1. Great news that you are getting started. Given your need to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement and challenges with visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep, focus on completing this project and starting more to address those objectives and challenges.

Question: Which of the following best describes how complete your data integration is from equipment, plant, and enterprise systems?

Your answer: Mostly incomplete 2. Examine whether data disconnects are preventing your ability to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement, and which integrations would most help alleviate visibility, materials tracking, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, or data prep. If there are many, consider projects that might improve more than one integration deficit.

Best Practices: Leaders have been investing in Industry 4.0 and digitalizing their operations for some time. As a result, they are more likely to have many relevant projects already delivering benefits and streamlining manufacturing. These efforts have helped support continuous improvement efforts and make the company more agile to manufacture effectively and efficiently in today’s ever-changing environment.

Pillar Description: Manufacturing Execution System (MES) deliver information to optimize production activities from order launch to finished goods. MES guides, initiates, responds to, and reports on plant activities as they occur. To do so, MES puts into context a wide array of current and accurate data from both operations technology (OT) and information technology (IT). MES can deliver mission-critical information about production activities across the product lifecycle, enterprise, and supply chain via bi-directional communications.

Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with for your company's current MES or Manufacturing Operations Digital System?

1. Streamlines work for frontline workers:
Your answer: True
Congratulations! You have an MES approach that enhances efficiency and supports your frontline workforce. This is crucial to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement.

Keeps up with changes in products, processes, and materials:
Your answer: False
If your manufacturing operations needs are changing faster than your MES can accommodate those changes, you will struggle to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement. Upgrading to a more agile MES could help address your challenges with visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, non-compliance.

Provides data fast enough to impact performance:
Your answer: False
Start the process to buy an MES that provides data to your operators, supervisors, and technicians fast enough to impact performance. It may help you overcome visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep. Improving MES could also be essential to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement.

Creates high value for resources expended:
Your answer: True
Congratulations for making wise investments in MES. Be sure this high value you are seeing continues, and your MES is future-ready.

Best Practices: At the center of Industry 4.0 and Manufacturing Operations Digital is MES. Every company has a system to manage manufacturing execution. Some are modern and sophisticated, others have been in place for a decade or more. Not every company has executive support or has invested the resources such a system needs to thrive and deliver full benefits over the long term. Top Performers are more likely to have made that commitment in both human and financial resources.

Pillar Description: Making decisions is at the heart of every operation. Since manufacturing operations move and change rapidly, making decisions quickly using all of the appropriate data is crucial to success, but not easy. Companies must use their data management capabilities to convert data into information and insights to drive decisions and action. With the workforce skills shortage, experienced people cannot be the primary resource for sound best-practice decisions.

Question: How well does your company do at transforming data to information to insight to decision to action?

Your answer: Poor 1. Closing the loop from data to actionable decision can be daunting, so start with one end-to-end workflow or business process that will reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement or help with visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep. Once you identify a process, first work on the transformations at the stage that is either easiest or that slows down the decisions most.

Question: Does your company use a digital twin of the plant to support and accelerate decision-making?

Your answer: No 2. While a factory digital twin may sound daunting, there are more paths to get to this today than you might know. Start to explore what your MES and other operations software providers have available, and start reading up on the benefits of having a system where the virtual and actual manufacturing operation can reinforce your improvement efforts.

Best Practices: Leaders are focusing on ensuring that they can quickly collect data, enrich it with context, and turn it into information. With information in hand, people and systems can analyze for insights and make confident decisions. Ideally, this information is available in a visual digital twin of the facility to show where issues are at any given moment. Top Performers are more likely than Others to use a digital twin of the plant

Pillar Description: Data management and governance are the foundation of manufacturing Operations Digital as well as analytics and AI. Smooth flowing, clean and reliable data is crucial for a complete understanding of an operation. Industrial dataOps is complex, however, with the variety of real-time and time-series data from equipment, automation, unstructured data from cameras and sensors, in-plant software, as well as transactional and event-based data.

Question: Consistent management of all plant data

Your answer: Fair 1. How can you manage your data more consistently? Start where it might impact your performance and help you to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement. Focus on what you can do now, not on gaining insights, data prep. Don't expect perfection, but improvement.

Question: Agree on a single source of truth

Your answer: Poor 2. Agreeing on a single source of truth can be challenging, but it is crucial for you to solve errors, keeping pace with change, non-compliance. You might start with a meeting among various disciplines (manufacturing, quality, maintenance, etc.) and prioritize initial projects based on your desire to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement and reduce visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep.

Question: Put IT and OT data into a common context for analysis

Your answer: Poor 3. Bring your IT and OT teams together to start a small project to help alleviate visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep. Take your first steps to understand the different mindsets, data speeds and formats, and missions and begin to find common ground.

Question: Where are the gaps in your data flow that typically need manual effort, handoffs, or intervention?

Your answer: Data collection, Enriching or putting data in context, Analyzing multi-source data, Generating actionable insights, Taking appropriate action4. Manual handoffs are a barrier to solving visibility, materials tracking, errors, keeping pace with change, manual handoffs, non-compliance, gaining insights, and data prep and to reduce cost, handle mix, adapt to change, and support improvement. Start a project to digitalize one of the steps or processes that has manual handoffs. Decide whether to eliminate handoffs in one critical end-to-end workflow or solve it at one stage of the data-to-decision, but move to improve.

Best Practices: Investing in technology to ensure data flows seamlessly delivers value to improve and accelerate processes. Smooth and automated data flows across equipment, automation, MES, and enterprise systems bolsters a company's agility. Top Performers have better processes and capabilities across a wide array of data management and governance within the manufacturing operation and beyond. Top Performers are about three times as likely to have excellent data capabilities as others.