-Frank Phillips, Managing Director, Fulcrum

 The Hook

“But we’re unique, no one else takes bespoke orders that morning, processes and ships them that afternoon.”

“Not even your competitors?”

“Yes, they do….but they are much bigger and can afford to develop systems that are perfect for themselves”.

“Is there anyway to test how bespoke these orders really are?”

The Problem

This conversation, in various guises happens regularly with clients, and sometimes it’s true, but often, we’re not as unique as we think. And that’s a good thing!

The more unique we are, or decide to be, in our operations the more expensive our journey to digitisation becomes.

This becomes particularly salient against the backdrop of New Zealand’s beating heart of manufacturing SME’s being in the midst of a perpetual battle when it comes to digitisation.

Firstly, weighing  up the challenging costs of developing digital systems and automated processes that are fit for purpose with realistic return on investment. Whilst secondly, being touted the value of Industry 4 technologies but facing a skills barrier to adoption.

The Solution

So what advice would I give to any manufacturing business looking to digitisation and automation be? It’s simple. Start thinking about your internal operations differently. Or paradoxically, not different at all.

Whilst there is widespread appreciation for needing a clear competitive advantage, that thing or things that set you apart and make you unique.

Extending this thinking to everything about your business can hamper digital progress, driving you to look for or build bespoke solutions that match your processes perfectly.

Where competitive advantage should be ‘up in lights’ externally. Internally we should be asking ourselves the question ‘how can we make this process as similar as possible to other operations’.

This is for two reasons:

1. It’s cheaper to borrow than build.
2. If that’s the standard, there’s usually good reason for it.

Without doubt there are exceptions to the second, but challenging ourselves with the question ‘why do we do it this way’ can only ever be a positive exercise.

Examples

This is brought to life by a couple of recent examples for me.

The first was a client who’s manufacturing operation used non-standard pallet sizes for storage and logistics. Whilst there was previous good for this,  it became insignificant when weighed up against the downsides of manual container loading; unique pallet racking and impractical cost to automate.

Changing to standard pallets opens the door for quicker and cheaper automation where the return on investment is more attractive.

Whilst automating palletising would be unlikely to feature as a competitive advantage, few would argue against the value of the associated productivity gains.

The second example was a client in the healthcare industry, manufacturing products unique to individual patients.

Every order must be checked multiple times by hand to verify all the details match, ensuring patient safety and optimum results.

When building their technology roadmap we explored software that could ‘read’ the orders and verify the details automatically.

Drawing on proven technology, namely Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the build and testing process would be lengthy and costly.

Challenging the status quo, we analysed how many orders were actually unique. It turned out that figure was only around 23%.

This insight opened the door to establishing SKUs in the ERP system that could be ordered by specific ‘part number’, allowing a vast reduction in the manual checks taking place.

Conclusion

By looking for ways to align our internal operations to industry standards (or even the standards in a parallel industry) costs will decrease and whilst the chance of successful implementation increases.

So, if like many manufacturers, you are looking to:

Track products through the shopfloor;

Measure real time performance;

Go paperless on the shopfloor

Or one of a myriad of other challenges, remember it pays to look at how you can use what’s already on offer and challenging the business to align to that, rather than developing something bespoke.

Being careful to invest in processes and technology that meet our competitive advantage is imperative. Understanding the price that we pay for being unique is vital when looking towards setting the foundations of Industry 4 in your operations,

 About the author:

Frank Phillips is an experienced manufacturing consultant. Based in Taranaki he runs Fulcrum, a platform that allows New Zealand Manufacturers to connect to Manufacturing Technology Partners. To find out more, visit: https://fulcrumnz.com/