Industry X.0: Manufacturing the World with Immense Possibilities
Whenever an external force or trend coincides with an industry, those who have long been following traditional methodologies, find the phase extremely difficult and challenging. Today, those involved in manufacturing must deal with macroeconomic and political volatility and also adapt to an ever-changing cohort of disruptive digital technologies — predictive analytics, additive manufacturing, and the Industrial Internet of Things to name a few.
Also, they must constantly reshape how they function in the digital era. Be it creating a connected workforce to enabling predictive maintenance.
There is also a rise of industrial consumerism where consumer-style expectations have penetrated every part of their value chains. This adds up to an intense pressure to innovate and rise above expectations.
What industry leaders are doing?
There are a handful of industry leaders who are showing the rest of the sector what AI can bring for manufacturing. There are areas like electrical equipment, heavy equipment, automotive suppliers and consumer durables, where many initiatives to apply AI technologies like deep learning, computer vision and analytics have been going on.
Certainly, AI applications can already be found right across the value chain or research and development, or be it manufacturing to marketing, sales and after-sales.
Industry trailblazers are the real definition of Industry X.0. These businesses not only leverage digital in order to drive continuous core operational efficiencies, but also leverage combinations of advanced digital technologies that help create new, hyper-personalized customer experiences.
How do they achieve this?
Smart:
Any and every product and production process is self-monitoring, data-generating, and aware of its ever-evolving business context. This is achieved by leveraging the potential of AI.
Connected:
All the communications that happen on and off premise are end-to-end and multi-directional. Any data-sharing among people, products, systems, assets and machines happens in real time with these industries.
Living:
Their culture across the entire enterprise is to act with speed, focus, and agility, to meet the needs and seize opportunities.
Learning:
Adaptive interactions take place across their organization which helps them create increasingly relevant and valuable user experiences over time.
How to follow in the footsteps and achieve success?
1. The Industry X.0 companies build their core engineering and production systems around digital that helps them drive new levels of efficiency. They are the ones who ensure that physical machines and software systems have been synchronized to unlock previously unseen cost efficiencies.
2. These companies utilize their investment capacity that can help them drive new, hyper-personalized experience for customers, via multiple “smart touchpoints.” This in turn helps them grow core businesses by inflating customer engagement.
3. Industry X.0 companies propagate and engineer modern business models that drive differentiated value for their clients and new revenue streams for themselves.
4. The companies segregate, train, and retain talent with digital-ready skills and encourage active collaboration among people and machines. You can take an example of wearable technologies, a boon that is a major part of IT solutions for manufacturing industry today, helping the industry workforce.
5. Industry X.0 companies make a robust ecosystem of suppliers, distributors, start-ups, and customers, allowing them to rapidly scale new business models across the digital value chain.
Conclusion
The key to value creation as an Industry X.0 business today is to follow a segmented approach to leveraging digital technologies. This allows new levels of efficiency, new sources of growth and new experiences for customers that sustain leading in the new. When they become smart, connected, living and learning companies can entirely reinvent their industries. It is the time to commence that journey.
