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Money
You never have enough budget to do what you want, right? But budget isn’t the main
differentiator between success and failure. If it were the case, every multinational
would have cracked that nut by now.
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12/6/23, 11:20 AM The real reason manufacturing digitalization fails
And to make things even more complicated: more money typically means more
budget approval steps, you need to come up with a clear ‘plan’ with ‘milestones’ and
‘resources’ etc. All things that work counterproductive when exploring the unknown
depths of (industrial) digitalization.
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Conclusion: More money won’t fix everything
Technology
We like to pretend we’re on the cutting edge, but let’s be honest. Digitalization of
manufacturing is at least 10 years behind other sectors. We struggle to get mobile
devices in our plants and think we’re modern if we put virtual machines in the cloud.
The technology we use is proven and to be frank… old by modern standards. New
standards are dreadfully slow to be considered and implemented on a miniscule scale,
typically showcased when we build ‘a plant of the future’.
ajay.gangakhedkar@thedigitalcore.in Subscribe
Talent
The talent war is fierce and attracting IT profiles to manufacturing is hard. If only we
had the smartest developers…
But just as technology isn’t the bottleneck, neither is talent. Certainly you’ll need
smart people, but having the very best isn’t as much of a deal breaker as you would
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12/6/23, 11:20 AM The real reason manufacturing digitalization fails
think. We’ve seen groups of ‘average’ people achieve superb results, and groups with
super talented people fail.
It’s also a catch 22. You’ll attract and retain the best only if you can keep challenging
them. The best won’t come for your first dashboarding project, no matter how3:38
pretty
your slides or high your ambitions are.
All the money, talent and technology in the world is meaningless if your organization
and its culture aren’t working in your favor.
The problem is, especially for manufacturing, that too often they’re stuck in old ways
of thinking. That same production mindset that made them so successful is also
completely inadequate when it comes to digital transformations (we wrote this article
about applying an Industry 2.0 mindset to 4.0 problems).
Optimizing and pooling knowledge to ensure people have 100% utilization rate
(or 110% if you push them past their engineering limits),
Split people over several ‘projects’ (Do you also have people assigned as 0.1 FTE
to 20 projects? Did that really work out for you and them? Did you ever consider
how much of their time is wasted in meetings?),
Well structured process and detailed planning with the goal to minimize risk,
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12/6/23, 11:20 AM The real reason manufacturing digitalization fails
“Let’s not solve this now, we need to deliver this project by this quarter.”
We all know these ‘laters’ never happen and only mean you’re accumulating technical
debt until it explodes in everybody’s face. If you can’t balance the short and the long
term you end up paying for it one time or another.
The good news: you’re not the first, you’re probably even late to the party.
This is the reason David and I are so enthusiastic about agile ways of working and
organizing (in the broadest sense of the word). It just works so much better and once
you’ve tested it, there’s no going back.
There’s no way we can summarize it all in one single paragraph, so we’d rather give
you some recommendations to get you started:
a. Maarten Dalmijn,
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12/6/23, 11:20 AM The real reason manufacturing digitalization fails
b. Jan-Willem Ageling,
c. Corporate Rebels
ajay.gangakhedkar@thedigitalcore.in Subscribe
You must have lived on a desert island not to have come across the
term "Industry 4.0" in recent years. It was the Buzzword of all
Buzzwords in the period 2015-2020. You certainly started some 4.0
initiatives or you might even have created your 4.0 project team.
Solution providers too had to jump on the bandwagon, if not they
were quickly labeled "old s…
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12/6/23, 11:20 AM The real reason manufacturing digitalization fails
Achieve big through small. Easy, right? Going for the big bang never
works out. In his book “Sooner Safer Happier”, Jonathan Smart
describes what happens: “When change is introduced in a big-bang
matter [..] a slight initial rise with either excitement or denial is
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followed by a deep depression when reality hits.
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