How can manufacturers digitally transform the way they plan, design, build, and operate their factories? How are Top Performers able to hit their critical program timelines, project spend, manufacturing quality, and agility targets better than Others? This survey of 180 companies explains how leading manufacturers better collaborate, employ digital twins, leverage digital tools, and integrate their systems across the factory lifecycle to more consistently hit their factory lifecycle goals.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Autodesk (registration required).
Table of Contents
- Embrace the Digital Factory
- The Pace of Change Demands New Approaches
- Data Challenges
- Process Challenges
- The Challenges Impact Business Performance
- Identifying Best Practices
- Make Manufacturing Planning a Business Priority
- Improve Collaboration
- Leverage Digital Twins
- Digitally Transform the Factory Lifecycle
- Integrate Manufacturing Planning Tools
- Understand the Advantages of Digital Transformation
- Gain the Business Value of Digital Transformation
- Conclusions and Next Steps
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
Embrace the Digital Factory
Recognize the Opportunity to Improve Performance
Our recent survey of 180 companies involved in the factory lifecycle shows that manufacturers commonly miss critical targets including program timelines, project spend, quality, and manufacturing agility goals. Missing these targets causes significant business impacts including project delays, budget overruns, higher product cost, and reduced manufacturing flexibility, creating a significant drag on asset utilization, innovation, return on capital, and profitability. The processes manufacturers follow across the lifecycle from facility design through manufacturing operations are ripe for improvement.
Digitally Transform Factory Design and Manufacturing Planning
How can companies improve manufacturing and factory planning across the lifecycle from facility design to operations so they can better hit their targets and drive profitability? Our analysis shows that the companies that best meet their project goals, the Top Performers, have digitally transformed. They have adopted digital tools and take a more collaborative, integrated approach across the factory lifecycle. Let’s see how they do that.
The Pace of Change Demands New Approaches
Recognize New Change Drivers
Before looking at solutions, let’s step back and understand why there is a problem in the first place. Part of the reason companies miss their factory design and manufacturing planning targets is increased complexity. Today’s business environment, products, supply chains, and manufacturing processes are evolving and are more complex than ever.
Most of the complexity in factory design and manufacturing planning is due to recent industry shifts including increased demand for sustainability, greater product variability, supply chain disruption, new production methods, and increased product complexity. A lot is changing. In fact, over one-third of respondents mention the increased frequency of change as a challenge on its own.
The Pace of Change Demands Innovation and Agility
The pace of change isn’t expected to slow down. Manufacturers continue to retool operations to support the shift to improvements like increased automation and further adoption of industrial additive manufacturing. At the same time, they must adapt to continued supply chain disruption and other disruptive forces. These business challenges place a variety of pressures on the factory and the factory lifecycle. Manufacturers must embrace agility and innovation in order toovercome these challenges so they can meet their targets.
Identifying Best Practices
Transformation is Essential
Manufacturers have to address complexity and adapt to shifting business, supply chain, and manufacturing realities. To do this, they have to work across departmental and company boundaries to plan, design, build, and operate their factories despite a variety of challenges with their data and processes. With all of the different parties involved and the complexity, it’s a wonder anyone hits their project targets. But there are those that do. Our benchmarks show that not all companies miss their project targets as frequently as others.
Identifying the Top Performers
We benchmarked responding companies on their reported ability to hit the following factory design and manufacturing planning metrics:
- Meeting program timelines
- Project spend versus budget
- Manufacturing quality
- Manufacturing agility
There was a wide variety of performance against these combined metrics. We identified the top 22% and labeled them “Top Performers” and labeled the poorer performing companies as “Others.”
Determining Best Practices
After identifying the Top Performers, we analyzed their organizational, process, and technology approaches for factory design and manufacturing planning. We looked to see which approaches are more common to the Top Performers to make recommendations to the Others. Let’s review the findings.
Conclusions and Next Steps
Operational Factory Lifecycle Challenges
The survey uncovers challenges and business impacts but also ways to overcome them. Manufacturers face business, data, and process challenges in factory design and manufacturing planning. These challenges result in project delays, budget overruns, higher product cost, and reduced manufacturing flexibility – all of which damage asset utilization, innovation, return on capital, and profitability.
Today’s manufacturing business environment is too competitive and dynamic for companies to ignore these challenges. They have to pursue innovation, flexibility, and agility through digital transformation. The Top Performers have taken this to heart. They are more able to hit their critical targets including program timelines, project spend, manufacturing quality, and agility. To do this, they start with more integrated planning and higher-level leadership.
Embrace Digitalization and Collaboration
In addition to organizing for success, Top Performers are more digital. They have:
- Implemented more effective collaboration capabilities
- Leveraged digital twins more broadly from planning through operations
- Adopted digital tools across factory design and manufacturing planning
- More fully integrated their systems supporting the factory lifecycle
Enjoy the Benefits of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation offers benefits to all, not just the Top Performers. These benefits include efficiency, speed, quality, productivity, time to market, cost, and agility. These are critical capabilities given the challenges and rapid pace of change that manufacturers face. More importantly, the survey shows that digital transformation drives business benefits including higher asset utilization, ability to rapidly adopt innovation, and lower capital costs.
Based on the survey results, we conclude that manufacturers that don’t digitally transform their factory lifecycles will be at a disadvantage to those that do. It’s time for manufacturers to review their current capabilities and put a plan in place to improve factory design and manufacturing planning performance.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor Autodesk
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