The Drive Toward Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Industry

By CIOReview | Thursday, February 21, 2019

The manufacturing industry has traditionally been hesitant to react to the advent of technologies due to cost. To deliver greater efficiency and productivity, the industry must harness technology. The digital transformation of the manufacturing sector will touch nearly every aspect of business as existing systems, jobs, and business processes are instrumented, redefined, and optimized with artificial intelligence. Information technology, operational technology, supply chain, asset management, services, and the customer-facing system will be impacted by this far-reaching transformation.

The first step to digitization is to analyze the current state of all systems including R&D, procurement, production, warehousing, logistics, and marketing to sales and service. Digitization modifies every aspect of operations and supply chain and starts with equipment design and continues through product design, production process improvement, and ultimately, monitoring and improving the end user experience. It brings radical change in the way manufacturers share and manage operations.

Digital Transformation Trends in Manufacturing

The mushrooming of advanced analytics and machine learning is the most significant trend today. This technologies fuel demands for technologies like smart connected sensors, digital networks and other ways to transform data to the analytic systems, which can deliver values in operations and management.

Cloud application platforms provide a revolutionary approach for developing and deploying software applications, by replacing the traditional client model involving large, complex, monolithic applications were created and run. The pace of this trend is still accelerating as more and more manufacturers embrace this modern platform approach.

The inability of cloud only approach to keep up with volume, latency, mobility, reliability, security, privacy and network bandwidth barriers of the sector plant, made fog computing deliver compute, communication, control, and storage closer to where the data originates, enabling quick processing time and reduced network costs. Fog pools the resources and data between devices that reside at the edge and other nodes in the network.

By providing smart, connected products manufacturers can position themselves to enhance their customer experience with product and services. Digitization with the ability of remote connectivity allows manufacturers to improve their service operations and enables predictive maintenance, rapid service response, and an opportunity to offer revenue-generating products.

Technologies are advancing manufacturing forward, with a more efficient workforce, safer operations, and maintaining high standards in product quality, transforming the industry into a digital model.