Manufacturers of the world! Is your company’s ERP ready for Industry 4.0?

How can your company make sure to be competitive in the future whilst you’re under constant pressure working with efficiency, sustainability, quality and cost?

Technology enables the leap from good to great

The companies that are today successful have worked hard with their efficiency through measures in, among other things, quality control and cost control and it’s difficult to do anything but marginal improvements if you do not think outside the box and take greater more comprehensive grip on how rationalizations and efficiency improvements are planned and realized.

Either you think in new paths or you will slowly see yourself falling behind your competitors.

The answer to how to do radical grips on rationalization potentials is spelled Industry 4.0, which means a total transformation of how goods are produced and delivered and how production and delivery chains are made "smarter".

Modern connected technology is a key enabler in creating competitive companies using the right technology and digitalization that enables both information exchange but also a significantly increased degree of automation i. e. production, logistics, maintenance and quality assurance.

By utilizing the opportunity for increased automation in a production plant, both quality, productivity and resource utilization can be significantly increased by making the plant smarter and more flexible, which for example allows the change of production lines to reduce lead times.

-For example, Advanced Analytics can help identify the most efficient carrier, improve forecasts and inventory planning throughout the company, and optimize the Supply Chain process.

Where to start?

There are of course some fundamentals to think about like the goals for the digitalization, and that you have the basics for connectivity, data collection and analysis in place. Here you gain much if you choose an open scalable platform like Microsoft Azure which not only offers many essential apps, but also Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like Dynamics 365 Unified Operations, the Power Platform and solutions for i.e. IoT and AI. The good thing with the platform services is that you can take one step at the time in adaption of the technologies that in the end will help you improve your company’s efficiency and competitiveness.

The latest version of Dynamics 365 Unified Operations includes i.e. several new features for asset management which enables you to manage and control connected equipment as machines and vehicles. This means that you have the full support for managing and integration of processes as maintenance and production planning as well as i.e. real time reporting of material consumption or deviation in the manufacturing processes.

By adding sensors and measuring equipment that now is cheap compared to just a couple of years ago, comprehensive data is collected in real time for i.e. planning, production and quality control. Production data from i.e. Manufacturing Execution System (MES) can then be refined and used other systems i.e. ERP for making performance visible and available for advanced analysis both using data from ERP and MES i.e. BI tools. This enables preventive actions and decision making which is crucial for continuous improvements, reducing quality deficiency costs and on time deliveries.

Since this is done in real time there’s high potentials for increasing competitiveness, profitability as well as customer satisfaction.

By choosing the appropriate technology platform, ERP system and technology the following benefits can be achieved;

• Effective processes that greatly automate your administration in the business while ensuring access to decision-making in real time.
• Considerable reduction of administrative costs and increased capacity
• Faster decisions in close connection with, for example, manufacturing, which can prevent interruptions or delays in deliveries
• Substantially shorter implementation process that not only reduces cost and faster deployment, but also reduces the risk that the system being deployed solves the problems that the business need to handle today and tomorrow and not those that needed to be resolved last year.

Feel free to connect with me to discuss the content in my blogpost at any time!