Highlights of the latest trends in the switch to services in manufacturing companies in 2016

So what’s changing in manufacturing in 2016? The answer is quite a lot.

Whether you are working on the shop floor or have a seat in the boardroom attention to detail and planning ahead matters in today’s modern manufacturing company. To stay competitive you will need to keep up to date with what your competitors and others are doing in order to ensure your business is fit for purpose in the global fast moving world of big data and the Internet of Things. 

There is also a good deal of new research coming out of joint collaborations between industry and academics here at the Cambridge Service Alliance, and new methodologies that can help fine tune your business models.

In this special podcast the Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance, Professor Andy Neely, discusses the highlights and trends in manufacturing that companies are tapping into in 2016 to make the switch to supplying more services to their customers. 

Professor Neely discusses:

• Who the companies that form the global alliance of the CSA are and how they can provide case studies for others to learn from
• What can be gained from learning what your customers’ customer’s needs are
• Why technology is leading the way in finding new ways of connecting networks and supply chains
• Where knowledge exchange with others works and how to build new collaborations even with your competitors 
• When using the CSA roadmap of seven Critical Success Factors in the shift to services can inform your management decisions and give you new tools to help measure success
• How best to plan for Industry 4.0 and when to start changing the way you work whether you are the first or last to do so
• The theme of the Cambridge Service Alliance Service Week in October is “Innovating Your Business Model in a Digital Age” bringing together leading Alliance members and other key collaborators to provide thought leadership on platforms, services and data.

Key quote:  

“Increasingly people are looking beyond the boundary of the factory and saying how do we optimize the end to end enterprise. Productivity still matters today. How do I ensure the things I am doing are as efficient as possible, that I am not wasting resources whether that is material or the time of people and the data I can get these days. It allows me to monitor what is going on and often to identify where I might improve productivity.  

“I think productivity is still a valid measure for part of the agenda of the switch to services but then you also have to think about the customer and the outcomes you are delivering to the customer. If you think of productivity as a more efficiency type measure and ask yourself if you are using your assets well you also have to think of the effectiveness side of the equation and ask yourself if you are doing the right things with those assets. You need to question if you are  delivering effective results for your customer and actually balancing both the efficiency and the effectiveness. These questions seem to me to be central in manufacturing firms these days.

“People always say the pace of change is fast, when there were buggy whips it still felt quite fast in those days. One of the challenges for leaders of organizations is to understand what change is both happening today and what change is coming up in the future. You then need to think about how it is best to respond and how to best configure your organisation to respond to that change.

“The boundary of your organisation is changing, it is much more about networks and collaborations these days. But people get too excited about these thing, the IOT and Industry4.0 is not going to change the World in the next six months, these things will take a long time to do. The direction of travel is more connected devices more data and making smarter decisions with those devices and thinking about how to optimize systems rather than individual machines or individual supply chains.

“That is the way the World is going but it is a lot of work to get there. You are connecting up different systems all the time, you are trying to get data from different devices and you are trying to reconcile that data.

“It is a fascinating time to be involved in all this because in many ways the foundation of a 4^th industrial revolution that people talk of are being laid now and being involved in that is a wonderful privilege.

“Organisations can’t afford to stand still and first and last is not the right way of thinking about things but you need to think about what is the right innovation at the right time for your organisaiton.”