The future of manufacturing and role of data
It is becoming increasingly difficult for manufacturers to transform their manufacturing business systems by acting alone. No single organization will be able to deliver all the value that customers want. The required value will be created only when suppliers, channel partners and other customer touch points become connected ecosystems.
It is not enough to digitalize internal processes and link them with data. Today, organizations also need to connect and exchange data with external ecosystem partners. Indeed, COVID-19 has highlighted the need to rebuild more distributed supply chains with closer proximity to the market, in order to provide resilience against similar crises in the future. This requires connecting the engineering chains and the supply chains through data. Such connections enable resilient ecosystems, where functions may be physically separated but are digitally connected, so that they work as a single, integrated manufacturing system.
The keys to design integrated ecosystems, comprising internal and external processes, focus on driving the required customer value. These customer-value-driven ecosystems can flexibly combine necessary processes to deliver tailored value that meets the customer needs. This creates end-to-end manufacturing systems, linking internal and external processes with data.
