posted on 5/10/2011 6:36:54 PM
Speakers at the annual conference stressed the value of enterprise analytics, energy management, and product innovation.
PALM BEACH, FL—Speakers at the Manufacturing Leadership Summit 2011 stressed the need for U.S. manufacturers to reinvent and innovate to create the value needed for a new industrial revolution.
“There are no limits to the value-added revolution,” said Managing Automation Editor-in-Chief David Brousell in his opening remarks, citing four areas of value creation that manufacturers can tap into: innovation, information leadership, business transformation, and building on an ecosystem of partners.
Brousell set the tone for the rest of the day’s presentations, which included discussions on the transformational power of enterprise analytics, the value of reinvention, new technology development strategies, and smart-grid solutions.
Of course, many companies are already leveraging analytical tools such as business intelligence in an attempt to create new value. But such efforts won’t move the organization in the right direction if BI is not strategically tied to business decisions, said Tom Davenport, President Chair of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, in his “Analytics in Manufacturing” presentation. And to do that, BI can’t be a departmental play, but rather an enterprise-wide initiative, he said.
“If you are going to be an analytical competitor, you have to get the silos of data, people, and technology together,” Davenport said. And to achieve the highest level of value from analytics, manufacturers should build strategies that include creating an analytical culture that can make better decisions, he said.
The ability to adjust the cultural dynamics of a company and the country as a whole was at the heart of the presentation made by Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, who was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine for his formula for reviving manufacturing plants.
Surace painted a picture of American manufacturers losing their number-one spot as China rapidly targets growing industries. “They will cross us as the largest economy in the world by 2017…When they become the largest market, it means cars and products will be designed first for their market and we become the second market,” Surace said.
But manufacturers have a new opportunity to rethink the way we make everything, according to Surace. A major part of our focus should be on energy, he said: “Everything we make should use less energy, and we should make products that use less energy in the way they are used. If we do that, we have a real winning combination.”
John Gercak, Vice President of Information Technology at Eaton Corp.’s Vehicle Group, echoed Surace’s advice to rethink energy management in his talk on “Enabling Growth Through Innovation.” But growth and innovation can also be achieved through simple processes, such as Eaton’s effort to drive IT standardization around the globe and using new tools such as an Operational Contribution metric, which measures the value a technology brings to the organization—be it from a revenue perspective or customer requirements perspective. In addition, the company leverages an internally developed status dashboard that provides the visibility needed throughout its sites to improve operations, Gercak said.
Doug Dinon, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Leader of GE’s Global Research Center, followed Gercak with a presentation on the company’s new manufacturing technology development strategy. The company is building a flexible manufacturing space that seeks to fill the gap between taking new products from the lab and producing them in the factory. GE leverages manufacturing-readiness models that incorporate process analytics and engineering process management for faster throughput and lower production costs.
Overall, the common thread in the discussions centered on the need to rethink the way we approach manufacturing in the U.S. As Serious Materials’ Surace said, we can’t get let our companies crumble under the pressure.
As Brousell put it: “The better future we hope to realize will be found here in the manufacturing community, but only if we are prepared to seize the opportunity.”