As the pandemic continues to disrupt the supply chain, manufacturing companies must learn to collaborate with the industry at large, within plants, and on the ground level to overcome pressing challenges and continue meeting demand. Augury provides sharable, reliable machine health data and insights to help.
Supply chain disruption is easy for anyone to see, but the impact of the pandemic spreads far beyond toilet paper and household cleaner shortages. Since early 2020 and the emergence of COVID-19, issues like material and labor shortages, coupled with increased demand, have impacted nearly every industry. In a 2021 survey, the Institute of Supply Management reported that 56% of respondents cited shipment delays as their top COVID-19 concern, up from 16% in March 2020. Forty-three percent of respondents said their main concern was limited raw materials or supplies availability.
As the pandemic continues to surge into 2022, manufacturers will be wise to expect and prepare for further supply chain disruptions. But what can be done to mitigate the damage?
How to Alleviate Ongoing Supply Chain Challenges in Manufacturing
It might be impossible to entirely right the wrongs of supply chain disruption as the pandemic continues, but manufacturers can turn to advanced technology to increase collaboration with different parts of their ecosystem. Sharing insights around the real-time health of production lines can improve transparency, bolster resiliency, and generate new productivity efficiencies even as the supply chain continues to be unpredictable at best. Focus on enhanced, data-driven communication with the following steps:
1) Open your organization to industrywide collaboration.
Many companies might have once gained a competitive advantage by slowing down other companies and preventing them from innovating, but in the current landscape, that strategy is unlikely to bring long-term success. Manufacturers must adjust their mindsets to think about their companies as part of a larger effort within the manufacturing ecosystem. Combining experiences and learnings will help the industry thrive as a whole, while operating in silos will slow down supply chain recovery and harm every organization.
Consider Colgate, for example, a company that considers itself the best in the world at producing toothpaste effectively at scale. But it doesn’t aim to be the best in the world at trucking, warehousing, etc. So Colgate can focus on innovation around oral care and delivering it to the world, but it doesn’t need to hoard all the IP around the supply chain. If it can share details and innovation around supply chain technology and receive new ideas in return, however, it can likely share its products with the world much more quickly.
Engage with other industry experts via organizations like the World Economic Forum, industry-specific consortiums, or online groups. Discuss digital transformation in manufacturing, learn from each other’s mistakes, and begin to think of the industry as a single organism to keep healthy so that your company can thrive within it.
2) Collaborate around data on the assets and performance of machines themselves.
Manufacturers must then consider the importance of establishing a single language to communicate about machines, and machine data and insights should be at its core. It’s about arriving at some standard by which manufacturers deem data useful, so elements like information around spare parts, maintenance, conditions where machines break, etc., can be useful when shared on a global scale.
See how Augury’s Machine Health platform enables sharing and collaborating around data and insights with ease.
For example, think about the standard for personal information to identify people in modern-day society. The U.S. government looks to details like ID, name, address, and other fundamental data. Many companies rely on these standards, and some have even expanded the data pool, with companies like Meta (Facebook) creating huge troves of stats and identifiers for a person. Different companies hold different data, but they do share that data across other platforms for advertising. And while no one oversees these standards for identification, except for when it comes to privacy rules and regulations, they are clear across the board.
Different companies use the same machines across various plants and products within the manufacturing ecosystem. Sharing machine health data provides incredible efficiency because manufacturers can gain insights and contextual information about how machines are managed to ensure optimal efficiency with their own assets. When plants buy machines, they invest in the asset for its entire life cycle. The more data and insights you can access about machine health and management, the longer the life cycle will be and the greater your returns.
3) Enable communication and collaboration at the technical level.
While some manufacturers already have forums to discuss value-added production principles or management layers for a plant, forums for manufacturing technicians to collaborate, learn, and ask questions are lacking. Organizations that create more opportunities for industrywide collaboration at the technical level will gain an advantage over those that don’t.
With tools like Augury, technicians can easily share machine data and insights with other employees, inside or outside the company, to collaborate and learn. But management will first need to free up more of their time to seek out innovation and new ideas. With Augury’s AI-enabled platform and predictive insights, teams can operate proactively, spending less time on reactive and time-based work and more time on future-forward thinking.
To learn more about how Augury’s Machine Health platform enables valuable technician collaboration, read this blog post.
For manufacturing companies, surviving today’s supply chain disruptions and thriving well into the future will require more collaboration and innovation at the industry, company, and ground levels.
To learn more about how Augury can enable your teams to gather and share advanced machine health data and insights at scale, get in touch today.
