Management Consulting
Future Factory
The Future Belongs to the Smart Factory
Businesses in manufacturing are facing a variety of challenges. Holistic strategies are more necessary than ever in order to remain successful in the future. The transformation toward a factory of the future will only succeed if companies position themselves clearly in seven strategic fields of action.
Design Your Factory of the Future Now
Changed markets, fragile supply chains, new competitors, changes in legal frameworks, and consistent commitments to sustainability continually increase the pressures on companies. A stable, long-term order book with a classic division of labor is history.
The ability to successfully lead the Future Factory in a complex world calls for multidimensional decision-making processes based on end-to-end digitalization. Companies need strategic guidelines to develop the self-image and goals of their individual Future Factory.
The Future Factory concept and its fields of action act as a framework for outlining a target vision like this. Just like the North Star, it is part of a comprehensive operational transformation which harmonizes all business areas and focuses on the entire value chain.
Strategic Fields of Action of the Future Factory
There’s no standard idea of what the Future Factory will look like and there can be no general solution for the smart factories of tomorrow. After all, every factory must be aligned with a company’s individual needs, which differ according to its goals and orientation.
We have identified seven fields of action to help companies develop their individual vision of the Future Factory:
Transparency
Data Is the Fuel of the Future Factory
The Future Factory sets new standards in terms of consistent transparency. To achieve the maximum goal, all data items are captured end-to-end, collected in structured ways, integrated across all system levels, and analyzed by means of artificial intelligence. Information is fully available across the entire value chain in real time.
This accelerates planning processes, avoids miscommunication, and enables flexible collaboration in terms of place and time.
In that way, a manufacturing company can respond not only to a more and more complex external world but also anticipate trends and predictively incorporate appropriate actions into its planning process.
Agility
The Future Factory Reinvents Itself Day in Day Out
Its flexible organization enables the Future Factory to adapt itself to a wide variety of requirements in largely smooth processes. Modularized interfaces, anticipative and reactive supply chains hedge that effort.
At the same time, flexible organization ensures fulfillment of the expectations pinned on a sustainable factory that manufactures products in energy-efficient ways and creates closed-loop material cycles. The higher the level of agility achieved, the lower the vulnerability to crisis.
Scalability
Standardization Creates Individuality
The Future Factory is scalable. The organization featuring standardized modules allows for an efficient adjustment process enabling individual response to the volatile environment of supply and demand. In addition to significantly reduced planning costs, the amount of complexity to be managed also decreases and the controllability of the production system increases.
Being able to respond to changing market requirements without delay and preferably without production downtime and impaired delivery performance will be a success factor going forward. Companies that manage to immediately realign themselves as needed stay reliably focused on their business goals.
Automation
Anything That Can Be Automated Will Be
The combination of smart technologies and autonomous systems in the Future Factory enhances productivity and efficiency, enables zero-defects production, and relieves workers of the need to perform routine jobs.
Smart robotic systems and their optimal collaboration with people play an increasingly important role in the Future Factory. Equally important are self-controlling operations using autonomous transportation systems on the shop floor where collaborative robots with innovative sensors and cameras guarantee contactless collaboration with people. At the same time, AI systems are taking over tasks in indirect areas, reducing the complexity and effort required for control.
Resilience
The Future Factory Knows No Crises
Resilient factories can anticipate the constant changes in their environment and dynamically counteract them independently. In the Future Factory, changes are always understood as opportunities for further development.
Systematically building resilience means always keeping all opportunities for further development alive and largely independent of external conditions. Going forward, companies will need to determine in greater detail and ore consciously what core competencies they want to keep and hedge in their own factories and hat services to procure externally. The idea of a “breathing organization” that operates efficiently even during extremely adverse events will be decisive for the success of Future Factories.
Sustainability
Only Green Factories Will Be in the Black
The Future Factory of the future is a green factory. It focuses on sustainability and zero emissions by combining resource-saving and ultraefficient value creation processes.
It takes more than just efficient utilization of the resources on a company’s own directly visible shop floor to achieve true sustainability. Sustainability also implies the areas upstream and downstream of production or, in other words, everything that is discernably related to a company’s manufacturing activities. In its target state, the Future Factory no longer has a negative ecological footprint.
The key lies in considering the entire factory life cycle with active life cycle management in factory design. The intelligent combination of new and traditional technologies as well as adapted operational management leverages sustainability potential – and at the same time optimizes economic efficiency.
People
Decision-Makers and Shapers in a Participative and Appreciative Work Environment
People are the focus of the Future Factory. Monitoring of complex digital systems and adjustments to new technologies can only be achieved with qualified specialists. Hence people will continue to set goals while automated processes handle the routines. The Future Factory offers attractive and appreciative work environments and enables employees to develop their creative and strategic potential in highly complex tasks. In future, people and technology will meet at eye level.
Your Future Factory with Ingenics Consulting
The time is ripe for companies – regardless of their individual products – to develop the vision and goals of their Future Factory.
Among the things our consultants do, they support you in mastering the transformation into the Future Factory and positioning you to be futureproof in the seven strategic fields of action.