Page 18 - Industrial Technology EXTRA - 6th April 2020

SMART MANUFACTURING...

a cultural change within the engineering and down effort as employees need to be involved
manufacturing sectors if these technologies are to throughout the process. Starting with smaller
be exploited to their fullest. initiatives, it is worth testing and trialling these
When consultancy Capgemini Invent surveyed before rolling them out across an organisation.
more than 1,700 business leaders in 2017, for Furthermore, digital transformation needs to go
example, 62 percent of them of said that their own hand-in-hand with the organisation’s wider
corporate culture was the biggest obstacle to digital business strategy.
transformation. This should not come as a surprise;
the shift to a digital world can be unsettling. With it Supply chain integration
comes the need to work in new ways, with new The emergence of Industry 4.0 technologies is
tools, for example. In some cases, staff may fear a already having profound effects on the
loss of autonomy. Increased transparency also manufacturing industry. The real-time data being
means there is nowhere to hide if things start to go generated using these systems, for instance, is
badly. driving the greater integration of the different
The bad news, according to Capgemini’s elements of the manufacturing supply chain.
research, is that companies in the mechanical and In the very near future, component
plant engineering sectors are late adopters when it manufacturers will be able to access data from
comes to the creation of a true digital culture. customer machines and will be able to manufacture
Digital change cannot be achieved as a purely top- replacement parts so that they are ready for

6 April 2020 • INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY EXTRA! • p18