Too often, discussions about smart manufacturing are too abstract to be useful. Claims that it connects billions of machines and people confuse rather than clarify. To gain the benefits, you need to get specific.

To do that, it’s helpful to review how the characteristics of smart manufacturing correspond to your business goals and tactics. This will help you decide how to leverage and deploy the technologies in your company.

Future articles will review the characteristics from the perspective of traditional business goals, describing how smart manufacturing will help you address the need for speed, meet more complex customer expectations, improve decision making, and build and sustain operational improvement and business growth.

Smart manufacturing is …

Flat

When people talk about businesses being “flat,” they’re referring to eliminating the layers of management between the top and the bottom of the organizational pyramid. In the factory, they’re referring to the manufacturing technology stack that connects and helps control the production process from the plant floor to business planning and logistics.

Smart manufacturing flattens both of these hierarchies by providing more access to more business data to more people, which otherwise would have been obtained through the slow process of information moving up and decisions coming down the hierarchy.

Executives planning a smart business strategy should look for ways to “democratize” data. They should use smart technologies to, for example, eliminate reports and meetings, where decisions are traditionally made. Instead, they should use smart technologies that make the appropriate data available via dashboards to those who need it, when they need it. Early adopters, for example, provide plant floor operators with specific machine and production-quality data while delivering executives factory-level data with exception alerts.