How to jump start your digitalisation journey to help drive efficiencies, innovation, agility, and market leadership.
For all the talk of Industry 4.0—not to mention the billions manufacturers invest in digitalising their operations—a truth stays hidden: Too many initiatives fall short in delivering near-term value and establishing a long-term future for businesses.
That’s unfortunate because digitisation can have huge payoffs in efficiencies, innovation, agility and market leadership—if done with the right partners. In advising hundreds of manufacturers worldwide, Dell Technologies and EY teams have found their digitalisation journeys often encounter three big hurdles:
1. How do I start? In these cases, the costs of aging infrastructures, including unplanned downtime, increasing maintenance and repairs, and retiring workforces, can undermine profitability and competitiveness. Disparate systems and data silos likely hobble operations further. Additionally, they incur opportunity costs from suboptimal efficiencies, quality and market responsiveness.
Although they recognize the importance of upgrading their plants, these manufacturers must also keep production on schedule. Industry 4.0 planning and execution needs time, capital, know-how and an appetite for risk. Finding qualified, outside experts to help can itself be a formidable task.
2. How do I scale? With plant digitalization started, many manufacturers may feel stuck in getting their proverbial flywheels turning. Perhaps adoption and utilization of their technology investments are less than expected. Integration with existing assets could also be an obstacle.
Even if a new system pilot succeeds, how to deploy it consistently and repeatably across an entire plant or fleet of plants isn’t clear. Large, distributed organizations may also suffer the “not invented here” syndrome, often masking a functional or local culture’s resistance to change.
3. How do I accelerate? Among manufacturers that are well into digitalization and seeing clear payoffs, some may feel progress is stalling. Maybe improvements in their metrics for overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) have plateaued. They may want to deploy additional technologies, such as edge computing, robotics, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, but they’re uncertain how to expand their digital capabilities without putting their gains at risk.
To help manufacturers answer these questions, Dell and EY teams created Manufacturing Throughput-as-a-Service (MTaaS). Dell Technologies provides the technology infrastructure fundamental for MTaaS, especially at the edge of the shop floor. Dell also develops reference architectures that certify the solutions of the EY manufacturing technology partners—independent software vendors (ISVs)—on Dell Technologies Edge Solutions, accelerating time to market. This helps de-risk each ISV’s respective solution, accelerate its implementation and deliver its expected value.
Together, EY, Dell Technologies and the ISVs remove the complexity of having multiple vendors involved. This ecosystem of partners now has shared accountability—to both the manufacturer and each other—that ensures their solutions’ interoperability and, in combination, the manufacturer’s desired results.
With MTaaS, the burden of CapEx spending for hardware and software is shifted to OpEx with the as-a-Service model. This lowers the CapEx burden on the plant and keeps your technology up to date with updates and upgrades.
Lifting the burden, simplifying complexity
Access to an evolved, single-source partner ecosystem lifts the enormous burden of finding, qualifying and coordinating the complex tasks of your own partners. It also lessens the risk of potential high-cost digitalization failures.
The MTaaS technology reference architecture is comprehensive and highly secure. It vertically extends from the plant floor to enterprise management’s top floor. Horizontally, it spans:
- Data sources of every kind, including field-level sensors and actuators to equipment, their industrial control systems and manufacturing execution and enterprise resource planning systems.
- Data ingestion at the edge, with data gateways, hubs, aggregators and historians, plus the networks and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) communication protocols linking them.
- Data processing and storage, both on-site and in the cloud, each used as most appropriate and cost-effective.
- Data analytics and business intelligence, delivering data-driven insights in real time for better, faster and more informed decision-making and even predictive alerts.
- Visualization, at operational, supervisory, engineering and management levels, which assists with closed-loop digital twins for product, process and performance simulations.
- External dimensions, including supply chain management and optimization, secure ecosystem connectivity for technology partners and OEMs, and automated regulatory compliance.
To make MTaaS cost-effective, we help manufacturers reimagine their business approach for procuring and investing, focusing on outcomes while easing the upfront CapEx to get started. We also advise on needed initiatives for organizational change management to foster faster adoption and utilization.
Facilitating co-creation and proofs of concept
By assessing specific manufacturing challenges, we can test tailored MTaaS solutions in a working environment at Chicago’s EY Digital Operations Hub at MxD (Manufacturing x Digital). This facility allows manufacturers to experience pre-certified solutions and validate the business results expected from their digitalization investments. By taking full advantage of the MTaaS model, subsequent proofs of concept can save weeks, even months, from digitalization journeys.
As new technologies emerge and contexts change, we will evolve our development roadmaps and align with deployment strategies for MTaaS user operations. Meanwhile, manufacturers can enjoy confidence in their digital investments as well as the compounding value of their returns in more innovations, greater profitability and a sharper competitive advantage.
To learn more, visit MTaaS on EY.com and contact EY at [email protected].
Scott Dixon, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Leader, EY.
Scott leads EY Americas Advanced Manufacturing Technology, providing 35+ years of strategy, technology and operational insights to drive value and helps clients achieve their transformational objectives through people, process, technology and data.
Willie Reed, General Manager, Retail and Manufacturing, Dell Technologies.
With 20+ years in vertical solutions and go-to-market, Willie leads a specialized team, helping Energy and Manufacturing clients improve outcomes using AI, Edge, Multi-Cloud, and Cyber Security technologies.
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