随着越来越多的制造商采用智能制造方法，增加了组织内部的连接性和数据可用性，他们也意识到，连接的供应链成为市场上的战略竞争优势。来自Gartner预测，在五年内，有50％的大型组织将作为合作数字生态系统而不是离散的公司竞争，共享投入，资产和创新。制造生态系统中新的合作和集成程度不仅可以提高可见性，而且可以提高速度和弹性。这也是规定性的，提供了非常具体的建议，就我们如何管理制造运营的生命周期较明智的建议。它提供有关影响制造业务的生命周期的建议，包括供应链，人员，现金，产品，生产和生产资产。
The rapid adoption of digital technologies keeps fueling disruptive change in the marketplace. Consumer-facing technologies have become embedded in our lives and are increasingly making their way into industrial operations, enabling information sharing, communication, and operational analysis in real time.
Speed and data are the currency of today’s supply chain. Companies that learn to coordinate a supply chain in real time are becoming better options for their customers, and quicker to see new opportunities in the market and respond to disruptive changes.
The supply chain woes that resulted in weeks of empty shelves and missed deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need to enhance collaboration features in the supply chain to become more resilient and improve the ability to absorb, adapt, and recover from a disaster or disruptive event. In fact, according to Accenture, companies are increasingly prioritizing restructuring their supply chains and approaches to production to counteract such disruptions.
Manufacturers are not only enhancing traditional supplier management features like procurement and issue management, they are also implementing enhanced features like demand-capability matching, dynamic fulfillment, and product data services. The new ecosystems favor suppliers with specialized modular capabilities and services that can be recombined and scaled as required to accommodate market and supply chain changes.
In this journey to a highly connected ecosystem, small and medium-sized manufacturers can take a low-risk incremental approach as long as they follow a strategic Smart Manufacturing roadmap. Practical tools to establish such a roadmap are accessible to manufacturers through CESMII—the U.S. Smart Manufacturing Institute.
但是，制造商应首先建立一个基于内部技术的，洞察力驱动的基础架构和文化，以进行透明度和协作。云服务和企业对企业的集成可以帮助他们将合作提升到供应链中的新级别。可以在Mesa International的智能制造指南中找到示例。一个示例描述了制造商如何在多个阶段推出模块：
- 生产监测 - 对生产活动表现的现实时间；
- 质量跟踪 - 将智能数字附件和测量设备（例如卡尺，仪表）无线传输到检查员的移动应用程序；和
- 材料需求跟踪 - 现实时间材料可用性状态更新到商店地板系统和ERP，以主动避免由于物质不可使用而导致的机器饥饿时间。
The solutions were implemented gradually in one plant with an initial investment of around $20,000 before they were rolled out to four more plants. The benefits realized included improvement of data accuracy, product quality, reduction of material loss, and rejected parts yielding savings of $32,000 within 18 months. Another example describes how a manufacturer extended these smart methods into their supply chain to improve the visibility of component inventory commitments and remove uncertainties that were causing delays in their deliveries.
Check out theCESMIIresources and the MESA Smart Manufacturing guidebook for more examples on how your company can get started on the Smart Manufacturing journey.
