The manufacturing industry is under ever more constant pressure to produce better goods more quickly and at lower cost. With increasing global competition and the economic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, industries must take huge leaps forward in streamlining operations, re-tooling plants, and innovating how they design and build products in order to boost or even simply maintain profit margins.
In the past two and a half years, as manufacturing companies in the defense sector have struggled to cope with unprecedented challenges and disruptions, lean digital manufacturing has gained prominence as an ideal method to solve the kinds of complex problems and disruptions caused by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and other world events.
There’s no question that we’ve entered the era of Industry 4.0, described by pwc as encompassing “end-to-end digitization and data integration of the value chain.” Industry 4.0 companies optimize production to the fullest extent by connecting physical, virtual, and human assets, and integrating all operations and internal activities.
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, companies must cope with greater uncertainty than ever before, due to the unpredictability of consumer demand, dramatic fluctuations in supply chains and the instability of the broader economy. The future looks just as unsettled, with manufacturers tasked with trying to determine the ways in which things will settle in the new normal i.e., Which changes will be long-lasting or even permanent. In an environment in such flux, some have wondered whether Lean Manufacturing remains as relevant and valuable as in the past.
Right now, manufacturers barely have time to catch their breath, never mind consider how the future may look. Manufacturers face a unique set of constraints that make the pandemic crisis particularly challenging: Factories have high sunk costs, a need for skilled labor, and complex supply chains. Even if is still possible to operate in the crisis, operations can be easily interrupted by key skilled workers being absent or supply chains being interrupted. Simply put, with that level of sunk costs coupled with a dependency on commodity pricing, operational losses can mount quickly.