The Business Case for Digital Transformation: The Shop Floor Perspective

Tim Stuart from Visual Decisions, looked at the same question — creating value frm digital transformation — from the perspective of the shop floor. Some of his key points: 

  • Is there one department that is driving digital transformation? There are many different places to start the digital transformation journey. 
  • Are you doing a digital transformation of the enterprise or a digital solution to an immediate problem? Think about:
    • Value and time-to-value
    • Use case selection: there are hundreds of places to start. Am I focused on a narrow focus or am I designing a digtal transformation for the business
  • Resources: What are the time constraints? Can I bring in external resources? 
  • Readiness: Is my network ready? Do I have cybersecurity in place? Do people on the shop floor have the skills and behavior flexibility? 
  • Impact on production: How disruptive will your digital initiative be?
  • Focus on ease of implementation. Don’t start with an initiative that requires a huge effort. Focus on small initiatives that can scale. 

You will not get the performance you want unless you also focus on the changing skills, behaviors, and routines needed to suppoort the digital change. 

“Just buying a FitBit will not make you lose weight.” 

You can get access to Tim’s video and slides by joining our open community: ManuFuture Today: Leveraging AI for Small and Mid-Sized Manufacturers.

Just click here to join.

The Business Case for Digital Transformation: The CEO Perspective

On December 14, we conducted the next in our series of workshops to accelerate the digital transformation of manufacturing. We explored two different dimensions. The first is the CEO perspective. How do you present digital transformation to the C-Suite?

Mike King of LHP Analytics presented some useful frameworks to make the case. Some key points:

  • Provide a visual framework and continuously focus on key questions: It’s easy to get lost.
  • Two primary objectives for digital transformation: Where is your focus?
    •  Solve problems
    • Drive improvements
  • Figure out where you are on a digital maturty level: Where are we? It’s all part of establishing your baseline. 
  • Five key questions from the C-Suite perspective:
    •  What is the problem?
    • What caused the problem?
    • What are we doing to fix the problem?
    • When do we recover? 
    • How does this impact earnings? 
    • What help do you need to answert these questions?
  •  Once you have this framework in place, answer the question: “How will digital help”?

For more on Mike’s presentation, including his slides and a video of his presentation, join our ManuFuture Today learning community: Leveraging AI for Small and Mid-sized Manufacturers. It’s free. Click here to join. 

Driving R&D in Manufacturing | Ali Shakouri Podcast

Ali Shakouri sat down with Jeff Ton to explore how we can assist smaller manufacturers on thie digital journey. You can listen to the podcast here.

Research: Profiting From Data Commons

ManuFuturew Today is exploring how we might generate and share data among smaller manufacturers, in order to speed their digital transformation. Large companies have an internal infrastructure to capture and analyze data. Smaller manufacturers don’t. How can we pool data among smaller manufacturers to that we can speed their journey.

Recently Ali Shacouri sat down with a leading MIT researcher, Eric von Hippel, to explore these issues.

What is a “data commons”? How can it accelerate innovation? These topics and others are covered in a new scholarly paper: “Profiting from Data Commons: Theory, Evidence, and Strategy Implications”. We have posted the paper in our community.

You can read the Abstract here:

“We define data commons as repositories of freely accessible, “open source” innovation-related data, information, and knowledge. Data commons are and can be a significant resource for both innovating and innovation-adopting firms and individuals. First, the availability of free data and information from such commons reduces the innovation-specific private or open investment required to access the data and make the next innovative advance. Second, the fact that the data are freely accessible lowers transaction costs substantially. In this paper, we draw on the theory and empirical evidence regarding innovation commons in general and data commons in particular. Based on these foundations, we consider strategic decisions in the private and public domain: how can individuals, firms, and societies profit from data commons? We first discuss the varying nature of and contents of data commons, their functioning, and the value they provide to private innovators and to social welfare. We next explore the several types of data commons extant today and their mechanisms of action. We find that those who develop innovation-related information at private cost already have, surprisingly often, an economic incentive to freely reveal their information to a data commons. However, we also find and discuss important exceptions. We conclude with suggestions regarding needed innovation research, data commons “engineering”, and innovation policymaking that could together increase private and social welfare via enhancement of data commons.”