Answers to Top 3 Questions Manufacturers Have About Digital Strategy

Digital strategy is no longer a choice but a necessity for manufacturers, helping to streamline operations, enhance data-driven decisions, and fortify cybersecurity.

Develop digital strategies to help position your manufacturing business for innovation and growth. Start by getting answers to important digital questions.

Key questions manufacturers ask about digital strategy

1. How can a digital strategy help our manufacturing business?

Having a detailed digital strategy can help manufacturers create a roadmap for the future by addressing areas to improve financial and operational performance. This, in turn, can improve competitiveness in the market, increase efficiency, and drive long-term, sustainable growth.

Consider ways a digital strategy can help manufacturers.

Improving operational efficiency

Digital solutions can help manufacturers streamline operations, automate processes, and reduce costs. For example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can help manufacturers manage supply chain, inventory, and production processes more efficiently.

Enabling data-driven decision making

Manufacturers can use real-time data and analytics to make quicker and more informed decisions about their operations. It can provide improved visibility into inventory levels and other key metrics.

Improving cybersecurity

Help protect your manufacturing organization against cyber threats by implementing digital solutions and cybersecurity measures to keep your data secure. A comprehensive plan can include penetration testing to reduce risks on the front-end and an incident response plan to swiftly respond to any incidents.

2. What does a digital strategy look like?

When developing a digital strategy, first define your goals and identify what you are trying to achieve.

A digital readiness assessment is a discovery session to help your organization evaluate your digital capabilities and identify areas for improvement based on your goals. This process sets a baseline for where your organization is today and helps you develop a roadmap to accomplish your goals.

Through this process, you can explore the possibilities a digital transformation can have on your business. Create a methodical approach to implement action steps to meet your goals.

Once you’ve completed the digital roadmap, allocate resources to it and begin to execute.

3. How can digital transformation help our company with outdated and manual processes?

Automation is a small piece of the many capabilities digital transformation can have for a business, and it can bring direct benefits in a variety of areas — such as accounting and inventory management — through increased efficiency and quality.

There are major benefits to automating outdated systems.

Increased efficiency

Automation can help manufacturers streamline production processes, reduce waste, and increase output. This can lead to lower labor and materials costs and result in higher profitability. Increased efficiency is becoming more important as labor costs increase and hiring can be difficult.

Improved quality

Automation can help manufacturers improve product quality by reducing errors and defects. This can lead to lower costs associated with rework, scrap, and warranty claims.

Within accounting, manual processes can cause errors. Automating processes such as accounts payable can help decrease error risks while increasing employee morale by reducing monotonous tasks.

Reduced downtime

With automation, manufacturers can decrease downtime by reducing the need for manual intervention and maintenance. This may bring down costs of equipment repairs and maintenance.

Faster time-to-market

Manufacturers can use automation to bring products to market faster by shortening production and testing time. This may save money on product development and launch.

Better inventory management

Automation can help manufacturers control inventory levels by providing real-time data on production and demand. This may save on excess inventory and increase the chance of having inventory on hand when it is needed.

An example of a digital strategy: a manufacturing automation success story

There are tangible benefits to automating outdated manual processes. Learn how one manufacturer used automation and data science to significantly enhance efficiency, reduce waste, and scale operations.

Understanding the situation: a call to streamline production

A metal products manufacturer with complex production processes requiring advanced levels of materials management, engineering, and institutional knowledge needed help streamlining production.

The business used continuous production flow versus stock-keeping units and lots, which involves significant tracking at each production stage. One process was based on the experience of metallurgists, who determined production variables using a combination of anecdotal information and educated estimates. They manually worked out complex parameters involving customer requirements, machine capacity, raw material characteristics, and more.

Exploring the challenge

Inaccurate order recipes would result in significant scrap, and time-intensive rearrangement of schedules caused delays for other orders.

Working side by side with the metallurgists, CLA’s digital team gathered three years of historical data and built a custom machine learning model for production management. The team fed the model with chemical and physical properties of materials and each customer’s required specs — which created a bottom-up view of how to efficiently drive each order.

But that provided only half the picture, and engineers were concerned about balance. So CLA expanded the model to include a top-down inverse view of an overall production parameter target and its downstream impact on the day’s blend of customer specifications.

Achieving results

With balanced bottom-up and top-down views, the company is now driving production based on data science instead of guesswork.

• What used to take a metallurgist a full day — an average of 15 orders at 30 minutes each — now requires just 30 minutes to plan all 15 orders.
• More accurate recipes resulted in 75% reduction of scrap and improved factory floor scheduling, which reduced disruptions and created capacity to scale the business.
• Metallurgists are now spending their time improving testing in the lab to continuously refine the model for even better results.