4 drivers of transformation (3/3): And what about the people?

We mentioned the development of manufacturing in the previous article.  When we get back to the future of manufacturing, the human factor comes in play.

A leading manufacturing company was aware that improvements were necessary. It wanted to take advantage of digital technologies, particularly advanced analytics.

The supply chain and manufacturing: The boundaries are disappearing

The company started by getting specialists to gather data from the most important production equipment. They discovered many considerable gaps in basic manufacturing maintenance. That was the reason for the piece of machinery's frequent downtime.

Production quality was uneven and even the overall efficiency wasn’t as good as the efficiency achieved by their competitors. Without finding solution for these basic issues, any new technology added would just be a waste of money.

Illustration

People should be your priority

The grounds of today's challenges lie in people. Their performance must be managed. Digital systems can be used to enable everyone to see gaps and be able to fix them quickly.

The manufacturing company we mentioned in the previous paragraph was able to restructure about 50% of all their manufacturing processes and deploy data-driven predictive maintenance (bringing significant reduction in downtime) and advanced process controls.

Robotic in-plant logistics and human–machine collaboration provided better quality as well. Human capital was preserved, and only natural attrition and redeployment to other departments occurred.

To realize a new breakthrough in productivity, you need to mix people, new digital technologies and advanced analytics together. You need to align IT systems, get your business units to share their data and help your workers to adopt new mind-sets – for example, from intuition to reasoning.

Also, help them to develop new capabilities such as reading insights from data or taking actions based on these insights.

-jk-

Article source McKinsey & Company - global management consulting firm
Read more articles from McKinsey & Company

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