Page 34 - Packaging News Sep-Oct 2020

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LINE INTEGRATION & AUTOMATION | www.packagingnews.com.au | September-October 2020
Don’t put the cart before the horse
For manufacturers looking at smart factory upgrades, there’s a plethora of software platforms on the internet designed to help collect, extract, manipulate, store, and display information from various manufacturing systems. However, John Broadbent of Realise Potential argues, finding a platform is not the first step.
BEFORE you head down the path of considering investment in any IoT, IIoT or Industry 4.0 plat- forms, I’d like to explain why it’s of paramount importance you ask yourself and organisation a few key questions.
With Cisco research showing 75 per cent of IoT projects are failing, better to ask these questions first, to ensure you’re in the 25 per cent that succeed.
Let’s start with ‘Do you want to be best in class?’ If the answer to this first question is ‘no’ or ‘not sure’, then why are you considering invest- ing in a platform in the first place? You might gain some initial advan- tage, but chances are it will be a proj- ect that fails, the reasons for which are in the Cisco report.
If the answer is ‘yes’, then the next question is: Do you know what best in class looks like today, in a mod- ern, smart factory environment?
I’ve heard many organisations say they know yet talking with the peo- ple themselves I often find they wouldn’t know what best in class looked like if it bit them on the butt.
This is especially true where what I call the ‘grey-haired ceiling’ is in place with a management team that has been there for 20-plus years, so they have not been exposed to these modern concepts. Under these cir- cumstances, a platform-centric proj- ect or any other Industry 4.0 initiative has a very low chance of success.
There is a critical alignment between people, systems and pro- cesses, and the only way to ensure this is through effective leadership.
Which leads me to the third ques- tion, ‘Do you have a committed leader- ship that understands Industry 4.0 and is fully supportive of digital trans- formation, and willing to embrace the learnings from failure along the way?’
Or is it a risk-averse, finger-point- ing, lack of accountability, siloed culture where everybody plays it safe and failure is rewarded with a
carpeting or DCM – a three-letter acronym for ‘don’t come Monday’?
By now, I hope you can see where I am going with this line of questioning. If you get to this point and all your ducks are in a row, congratulations. You are way ahead of the pack and in a very small percentage, poised to
capitalise by being an early adopter. At this juncture the fourth ques- tion is: Do you have a list of projects with ROIs, an implementation plan with expected staged outcomes, an understanding of what you have already in place, where you’ll need to invest, the level of that investment
and when it will fall due on the implementation timeline?
This then leads to the fifth ques- tion: Where is my immediate low- hanging fruit, both in terms of cost and return? In other words, where is the biggest bang for my buck?
Out of this question comes an oppor- tunity for a pilot project or proof of con- cept, and an understanding of whether you do have alignment between peo- ple, systems, and processes. If you do, happy days, if not, you know what to do to get that alignment.
And please do not underestimate this previous point. I’ve listened to