Few things in my life have shaped who I am today, including graduating from MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (at the time, Leaders for Manufacturing) program. So, when an opportunity arose for me to talk with Dr. Duane Boning, Co-Director, MIT Leaders for Global Operations Program, about the future of leadership in manufacturing and operations,…
Industry 4.0 promises a lot to manufacturers – and is the source of a lot of headaches. The digitization of manufacturing reaches far beyond the factory floor making it much harder to realize the vision.
Even as they race toward the promise of Industry 4.0, manufacturers are stymied by a present-day, real-world problem: reliable, productive labor. Today’s smart, collaborative robots do double duty: giving manufacturers a workforce that works and future-forward solutions that support the evolution.
The ability of the supply chain to “sense and respond” to fluctuations in demand is at the heart of the demand-driven supply chain and I’d say that manufacturers are doing much more to find ways to get closer to the customer.
Robots are well-positioned to play a big role in accelerating the journey to the digital factory for manufacturers large and small
While 90 percent of US manufacturers confirm that their organizations see value in terms of productivity and efficiency in the digitization of their operations, only one in four are looking beyond the incremental improvements to greater opportunities in generating new revenue streams. This short-sightedness limits the scope of transformative strategy and reinforces the industry’s profile of slow to move, rigid and no longer the engine of economic good we all want and need it to be.
Jim Lawton 