 their transformation program than to be stuck in pilot purgatory.
Many organizations have formally established a digital transformation team, which is a combination of IT, OT, and operations. The DXO typically heads-up this team that transcends silos existing between internal departments and divisions, focuses on the highest value use cases, and serves as the company change agent for I4.0.
Some simple shifts in roles and responsibilities across departments may be needed to form centers of excellence (CoE), which can also spur I4.0 transformation. These CoEs represent different organizational functions; they share ideas, create resources, and work with external partners. The implementation of digital projects requires a unique mix of skillsets with some roles already prevalent in industrial plants and others in their nascence. Sourcing this expertise will require coordination with a broader partner ecosystem inclusive of technology providers, systems integrators, and advisory firms.
Enacting executive commitment early in I4.0 can create this organizational alignment, related project success, and fuel future change.
b. Formalize a Technology and Service Ecosystem
Putting the pieces in place extends past people organizational structure planning with formalizing the right technology ecosystem. Technology vendors who are business outcome-driven and view I4.0 as a digital journey and not a point-in-time transaction are more likely to drive double-digit impacts for industrial companies. Vendors with partnership tie-ins and strategic alliances create an ecosystem to accelerate I4.0 journeys. Guidance through the complexity of industrial technologies, knowledge of business processes and worker adoption best practices, and domain expertise and experience of implementing digital capabilities in factories are key components in evaluating technology ecosystems. Thinking of I4.0 as a technology-driven ecosystem rather than a one-off vendor engagement will greatly speed up transformation at scale.
c. Create an Enterprise Program Playbook
Most have realized the need to synchronize IT and OT, but have trouble formalizing what tangible action items to take to expedite I4.0. The goal should be to leverage an initial successful use case to establish a repeatable process to scale to other sites. We’ve seen this goal come into fruition more often when I4.0 and DX teams create an enterprise program playbook.
A playbook provides a recipe to adopt the prioritized use case in a subsequent factory, site, or other location. It includes learning resources such as roadmaps, best practices, program governance models, enterprise architectures, user roles and responsibilities, and organizational change and communication strategies. Leveraging this knowledge base empowers site leaders to seamlessly adopt the use case in their facility.
CASE STUDY: How Pfizer Scaled to 5 Sites in 18 Months
Pfizer is a major pharmaceutical manufacturer with more than 88,000 employees and 42 production sites worldwide. Faced with skills gap and workflow complexity concerns, Pfizer prioritized its I4.0 program around improving its manufacturing workers methods for learning, working, and utilizing information to drive shop-floor efficiencies.
The manufacturer created a Digital Manufacturing team to propel this I4.0 program and roll out an ”Expert Capture” use case to provide task guidance through captured knowledge content. To scale the use case across its many sites, the team created a knowledgebase – a playbook with any information its site lead would want to know to implement the use case.
This knowledgebase propelled Pfizer to rollout 12 solutions across fives sites in 18 months. Pfizer will continue to track recognized value, document metrics, and update the playback based on program feedback to foster future success.
3. Prove Value
With the program designed and the organization committed, the next critical stage is to prove the value in the selected site. The key at this stage is to validate the impact model built in the plan value stage and the playbook built in the program design stage. Depending on the complexity of the use case, it might take one to three months to implement the solution in the selected site and production line. Additional weeks must be allocated for factory workers and managers to adopt the solution and change their ways of working.
The program will need to implement a benchmark that quantifies value and measures the KPI improvements from the use case. Once value and results are determined, program sponsors must communicate these early successes and lessons learned to key stakeholders and executive sponsors.
Companies that include operational stakeholders in their transformation team are five times more likely to have a successful transformation program.
CASE STUDY: Pactiv’s Program Enables Rapid Scaling
Pactiv is a food packing manufacturer with more than 50 production plants globally. It was challenged with how to increase OEE and production capacity to avoid capex and increase recurring EBIDTA. Pactiv formed a Digital Manufacturing Transformation program that created three use cases – performance monitoring, factory asset intelligence (FAI), and Fully-enabled Smart Factory.
Pactiv prioritized these use cases on a factory-by-factory basis based on bottlenecks. Performance monitoring is the lowest cost, effort, and benefits solution Pactiv offers its sites, while Smart Factory is the high-end, resource intensive, full factory transformation. While Pactiv deemed some factories needed this end-to-end connectivity and some reached OEE improvements of 10%, most fit into its FAI solution.
FAI standardized components of the production process that are targeted at factory-specific problems such as high downtime costs. This value-driven program quickly proved its worth with improvements in factory-specific key metrics such as a 50% decrease in downtime from material issues in one an 11% decrease in downtime from equipment failures in another.
The manufacturer’s proof-of-value program with on-site surveys, baseline assignments, and project planning with 12-36 development sprints is putting it on pace to rapidly scale to dozens of sites in months. 6
4. Scale Value
With value planned and proven, manufacturers will quickly duplicate the use case to subsequent sites and roll out multiple use cases. At this stage, teams will streamline and execute parallel implementations while continuously refining and optimizing the program’s design. Additional technology considerations, such as the formation of an enterprise architecture, will come into play to make this speed and scaling vision a reality.
a. Agile Methods and Parallel Activities
Manufacturers need to start thinking of I4.0 in agile software development terms: quick sprints with targeted goals using cross-functional collaborative teams to generate powerful outcomes.
The key component of agile and scrum methods is rapid two- to four-week sprints where the most pressing developments are made. This can take the form of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), which provide the basic functionality to resolve a problem and a benchmark to build from. 7
Building a table stakes use case that creates some value is more impactful then spending months or years on a fully polished product or multiple use cases. It is critical, however, that any MVP is still developed with an enterprise architecture for scalability and not as a one-off solution. A good MVP deployment will start to uncover some of the initial business benefits and simultaneously be a robust, production-hardened enterprise platform. This is then used to maximize the value from the initial use case and build upon for the consequent use cases.
A governance model formed by a steering committee can
prioritize tasks and ensure alignment and accountability.
Establishing parallel activities expands past agile development methods for scaling I4.0. Bringing in subsequent site leads or champions from other facilities early into the use case roll-out process can greatly expedite adoption of their own. Setting a collaborative environment for these site leads to share resources and ideas enables rapid success.
Like agile, these enterprise rollouts need to be viewed as short-targeted sprints with parallel activities creating waves of transformation and replacing traditional sequential processes.
b. Enterprise Architecture Supports Scaling
Forming an enterprise architecture as the technological backbone to support scaling is a critical I4.0 consideration. It is unreasonable to expect GMs to make massive technological overhauls and investments in their facilities. This places an emphasis on pre-built solutions that can be seamlessly integrated and scaled across multiple sites.
The cloud’s scalable infrastructure increasingly places it on the roadmap for I4.0 projects and 58% of industrial companies agree.8
Inevitably, the prioritized use case will develop past the minimum viable product in functionality and complexity, and the cloud is more accustomed to handling a sophisticated workload across sites, users, and use cases.
The flexibility of the technology platform is integral to developing pre-built applications that scale across multiple sites. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms are at the heart of many I4.0 use cases, providing a means to quickly develop, manage, and analyze mission-critical applications on the factory floor. These platforms’ flexibility is essential to connect myriad industrial data sources and systems in heterogenous environments; manage the thousands of assets, production lines, and factories in these environments; and increasingly run powerful real-time analytics for unprecedented operational visibility and actionable insights.
CASE STUDY: Carlsberg Leverages Agile Methods
Carlsberg is a global brewer with around 100 production facilities annually producing 12 billion liters of beer. The process manufacturer needed operational transparency and end-to-end visibility across its many different sites, floors, and equipment to drive efficiencies and agility.
With its entire operations in purview, Carlsberg implemented a I4.0 program designed to rapidly scale across dozens of sites. Carlsberg created a flexible Digital Manufacturing Solution with agile development methods and enterprise architecture inclusive of a cloud infrastructure and IIoT platform. 9
The manufacturer quickly scaled its real-time production management solution across more than 20 breweries in two years and plans to roll it out to additional facilities in the near future.
5. Program Governance
Managing multiple parallel deploy