In research, smart factory benefits are categorized in two broad areas: productivity improvement, which deals with the cost-effectiveness of production, and increased market share, which drives the topline for manufacturers. At the core of successful smart factories is a digital twin that is a digital copy of the real world. In a factory, this can be a machine, process, system, device, or workflow. Digitalization is a trendy word, but what does it really mean to create a digital twin of your factory and what benefits does doing so give you?
While it might seem simple, a factory is in fact a very complex system that is continuously evolving. Traditionally supply chains have been structured in a linear way around siloed functions. Nowadays an increasing number of companies are shifting to a more complex supply chain by eliminating these siloes. The core idea behind a digital twin is ensuring that processes operate at maximum efficiency by bringing the right information to the right place, at the right time. This creates a real-time view of what’s going on, helping optimize operations in real life. But what benefits does removing silos and investing in a digital twin bring you?
It’s not a secret that in modern society, speed is a gamechanger in competition. Being able to react and adapt to shifts in the market can make it or break it when it comes to being one step ahead of your competition. Agility helps adapt to changing demand on the market fast, improving customer satisfaction. A digital twin helps make manufacturing faster and more agile, but also increases productivity by helping avoid unplanned downtimes in production.
The benefits in production are achieved by removing siloes and harnessing real-time information to eliminate waste from the production chain. Automated real-time information also makes it possible to increase efficiency in everyday leadership, as decisions can be based on facts that can be easily analyzed from visual dashboards. These dashboards show the desired information in the desired form, making visual and fast communication between key people possible. Real-time process information and alarms can be presented also in mobile applications, which decreases delays and increases production capacity even more.
With the help of smart factory initiatives, it’s possible to create a faster throughput time, resulting in improved cost-efficiency throughout the manufacturing process by for example reducing the price of a product, material, or service without losing quality. A digital twin helps monitor and optimize processes in the pace you wish to make changes. Not all changes have to be done at once but can instead be done part by part – prioritizing initiatives that produce the most value. A digital twin allows you to test different development path scenarios before you take the first actual steps towards putting them into action. Doing the testing digitally helps you avoid unnecessary costs from having to fix testing initiatives that turned out not to be the best choice. When you can test it digitally, no actual machinery needs to be invested in until the change is proved worthy by data.
Digitalizing the manufacturing process also helps predict and solve possible malfunctions in the process – resulting in less pauses in production and less faulty products. And the benefits don’t stop there: while making manufacturing processes more cost-efficient by reducing waste, you are able to also keep better track of your manufacturing expenses and optimize many cost-related tasks accordingly. This helps improve margins on the costs of for example raw materials and transportation.
In addition to end-to-end visibility and visualization, a digital twin allows for example real-time replanning and scheduling with internal and external facilities. A digital twin brings many benefits to the manufacturing side, but we can also look at it from the customer’s point of view. It helps deliver a better customer experience with on-time delivery, meeting constantly changing customer demands at the right time and keeping up good quality. All this strengthens customer loyalty.
Making a better experience for customers is important, but you should always keep in mind also the experience of your workforce. They are, after all, the ones doing concrete work to keep your company running. A digital twin helps you enhance the co-operation between machines and humans in a way that can create for example more efficient, ergonomic or in other ways better working environment. Digitalizing your company does not mean humans are no longer needed – actually, quite the opposite: with the help of digitalization, you can create a more valuable workplace for humans.
A smart factory makes many operations more fluent, reducing the time humans need to use to look for and analyze information. This releases resources to create new innovations. A factory’s digital twin can help you find hidden components of waste that can have a surprisingly strong impact on the overall operations of the company: you most probably will increase productivity by finding new ways of working you have never thought about before.
A digital twin is especially beneficial in the manufacturing environment where the process can be visualized. A full picture of the process can be simulated by analyzing past data and combining it with real-time data. This is the key to making smart decisions that can be explained through pure facts and data. In new innovations, it can help support your cause and give fact-based arguments on why an innovation should be pursued. On the other hand, it can also prove that there is no future for the innovation, helping you save time, energy, and money by not doing unnecessary work.
A digital twin can be utilized in any part of the production process. Even though a digital twin focuses on what’s happening in a factory in real-time, it also creates many possibilities to analyze past data to predict the future. A digital twin produces a situation image of the whole factory in real-time and can be taught to predict when certain things are going to happen. Predicting the future is important in for example machinery maintenance. When the need for maintenance tasks can be predicted before a machine malfunctions, the maintenance can be timed so that there is the least possible pause in the production process. It also helps save on costs if your company uses a yearly maintenance model where machinery is maintained yearly regardless of what condition it is in. Read more about smart maintenance here: Taking the leap from reactive to predictive – why should you switch to smart maintenance sooner than later
What happens if you can’t predict everything and a sudden, unexpected situation happens? A digital twin can be beneficial in many ways in case of a sudden crisis-situation such as seen in the past years with Covid19. With the help of a digital twin, operations in the factory can be monitored in real time despite the fact that human interaction must be minimized. Being able to make fact-based decisions also makes working through the unexpected situation easier.
Your digital twin can also be used for training purposes or to show key factors in for example sales and marketing. As you can see, creating a digital twin of your factory brings many benefits that have a direct positive influence on a thriving business. But even with all these benefits, many companies are still hesitant to take the first step into building a smart factory. Many say it has to do with lack of resources and knowhow as well as the overwhelming thought of what all needs to be taken into consideration when starting your smart factory journey.
Luckily at Fliq, we’ve already done a lot of work for you: we have developed ready-made smart factory solutions with leading global organizations for years. Our aim is to help you get going on your smart factory journey with easy to implement and cost-efficient solutions that enable you to add modules as your journey progresses.
We make it easy to create a digital twin of your factory – want to know more? Click here!
SOURCES:
Smart factories @ scale – Seizing the trillion-dollar prize through efficiency by design and closed-loop operations / Capgemini Research Institute
Deloitte Digital: Disrupting Business Models – Digital Supply Networks
