MANUFACTURING INNOVATIONS

World Class Manufacturing & Innovation

Innovation has many definitions. New products, process and business models that deliver
commercial value and catalyze growth opportunities. Manufacturing innovation promise to
impact every aspect of the manufacturing businesses, from design, research and development,
production, supply chain and logistics management through to sales, marketing and even end
of life management. These innovations will create highly intelligent, information-driven factories
and distributed business models that can respond rapidly to change and deliver entirely new
customized smart products and services. “Suppliers that relentlessly improve their internal
efficiency and consistently implement lean practices are able to protect their competitiveness
even against low labor cost locations. This, combined with an aggressive focus on innovation,
seems to be a viable strategy to combat the cost differential of emerging markets and a way to
protect the domestic manufacturing base.” (“The Odyssey of the Auto Industry”, Roland Berger,
June, 2004) The Manufacturers Council has been using a model of world class manufacturing
to guide its vision and activities. Most of the work of the Council over the last decade has
focused on operational excellence in manufacturing, and the building of a team-based
continuous improvement culture within the firm. Success in the future, however, will require
applying the same discipline of continuous improvement and even “discontinuous improvement”
in other dimensions of the company, including the innovation strategy of the firm. “Excellence in
operations remains a necessary – but no longer sufficient – condition for profitable
growth…Given the level of performance so widely attained today, operating excellence by itself
no longer sets a company apart from its competitors…Our study identified three routes [to
profitable growth]: expanding the supplier’s role by taking on a larger share of value-added
activities; by becoming more innovative; and by globalizing.” (“Profitable Growth Strategies in
the Automotive Supply Industry”, McKinsey and Company, 1999) “The biggest single trend
we’ve observed is the growing acknowledgement of innovation as a center piece of corporate
strategies and initiatives.
What’s more, we’ve noticed that the more senior the executive, the more likely they are to frame
their companies’ needs in the context of innovation.” (The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelly, 2001
Industrial transformation
The future of manufacturing is digital. New technologies combined with innovative business
models offer manufacturers various opportunities to enhance their value proposition, particularly
small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Technologies
Technology and technology utilization are the key drivers of manufacturing innovation and
productivity enhancement, pushing the substantial and rapid transformation of business models
and market structures. By investing in research, we provide innovative manufacturers with
opportunities to adopt new technologies, processes and up-skill their workforce to enable high-
value product development, improve their operations, create new IP and unlock new
opportunities.
Additive manufacturing,
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing, is the fastest-growing sector of manufacturing globally,
due to the many benefits it offers companies in terms of new product development, time to
market, reduced waste and product cost. Additive manufacturing allows for the design and
production of complete complex products and associated advanced business models such as
customer-led design processes and just-in-time production.

Automation and Robotics

Currently available industrial automation lacks flexibility because it is designed for high- volume,
low-variation processes and is economically unviable for many SMEs. Assistive robots work
collaboratively with humans and each other, to improve sensing, awareness and decision-
making capabilities that allow full autonomy and self-learning behavior.
Sensors and data analytics
Applied across the value chain, sensors and data analytics include predictive maintenance,
logistical tracking for operational efficiencies, quality control and service offering when
integrated into the end product.
Augmented and virtual reality
Augmented and virtual reality can be used to overlay product designs with end-use
environments, optimize machine settings in the virtual world, facilitate remote collaboration and
train or guide workers through complex or dangerous tasks.
Innovation and manufacturing
Innovation engineering and other critical business processes assist manufacturers’ growth
strategies for reaching new markets, manufacturing new products and, ultimately, job creation.
Next generation strategies for manufacturers include: technology acceleration, sustainability,
supply chain, continuous improvement and workforce. Manufacturers know they must focus on
these strategies to ensure growth. However, workforce development is often an afterthought.
Historically misunderstood, the workforce has been seen as fungible and expensive. The
development of Scientific Management in the 1950s, based on the supposition that
manufacturing workers need not think, but just “do”, relegated the human capital element of
manufacturing to simply just another input. Not so today. Today, all manufacturing employees
need to have soft skills as well as technical skills, including emotional intelligence,
communication skills, strength in cognition and analysis, business acumen, and creative
problem-solving skills. Supervisors are leaders, not just technicians, and are required to be
mentors, not simply bosses. Front-line workers can be valued for their ideas, not just their output and, these
days, as productivity reaches its highest levels ever, should be recognized for their intrinsic value – something
most often seen as intangible and unquantifiable. It’s hard to parse the tangible value of employees (labour)
from the intangible value they create (ideas, productivity, innovation, customer goodwill) because we
traditionally don’t use accounting measures that capture that value (although we can). We write off recruitment,
training, wages, salaries and benefits as expenses and don’t think of them as investments similar to our capital
investments in technology, facilities, marketing or supplies that can be amortized over time and with innovation
and growth in mind. Jonathan Low and Pam Cohen Kalafut 1 describe in their list of intangibles to company
performance that relationships, human capital, intellectual capital and workplace organization, and culture all
affect business outcomes. It seems irresponsible to ignore them in this competitive global economy and to not
align and integrate our workforce systems with our other business/production systems.
MANUFACTURING INNOVATIONS 2))))))))))))))))))))