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SMT007-Aug2020

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AUGUST 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 77 the factories we have had the opportunity to consult with, Industry 4.0 implementations fail and perish rather quickly because of the lack of vision and clarity from the highest levels of the organization. Without clear directions— and these tend to be plural—from the leaders on the factory's digital transformation strategy, many plants and their corresponding manage- ment will have their own interpretation and ideas on implementing Industry 4.0 technol- ogy enablers. This creates major issues that they may not be expecting, such as: 1. Inability to leverage core infrastructure and platforms across the company to keep it cost-effective. a. When we approached single satellite plants on the smart factory journey, discussions were mostly delegated to engineering and operations manag- ers. One of the key Industry 4.0 technol- ogy enablers would be big data analytics for operations. However, this requires the involvement of the companies' IT stake- holders as typical IT concerns about security, the cloud, and bandwidth need to be resolved. Moreover, IT capital expenditure (capex) such as server hard- ware and data centers is not under the purview of the operation teams or OT. b. The industry is just beginning to real- ize the importance of OT/IT convergence. However, this is often not reflected in the organization as the digital transformation (or lack of) has yet to take shape in the company. What we also realized was how siloed IT and OT teams are and how little they work together. The disciplines, budgets, management, cultures, objec- tives, expertise, or even just the technical language of both IT and OT are worlds apart. c. What eventually happened was that the OT teams were reluctant to get the global IT team involved as they see it as an obstacle rather than a necessity or value. Thus, instead of having the big data man- ufacturing analytics solution in a cen- tral corporate server or cloud where other plants can start to leverage the same infra- structure without adding scaling up costs, the customers opted to buy their own server hardware and install it inside that plant. This will never be cost-effective for scaling up across the company, and it would be an expensive lesson to learn. Without IT's blessing, this solution will be short-lived anyway. 2. Silo resource investments that only focus on one plant objective without alignment to the corporate strategy and objectives. a. For example, one plant may have work- force inefficiencies and competencies that motivate them to implement robotics to replace workers, augmented reality to deliver higher-quality training, and deep learning in cameras to monitor worker non-compliance. However, this may not serve to fix the root cause, and that is that the plant may not be adhering to the best practices that the corporate had outlined or that it is simply a poorly run operation. b. We found that often when we were faced with such situations, we were not sur- prised when we consulted with upper management and corporate executives that the company has more pressing key per- formance indices such as reducing qual- ity issues and return merchandise authori- zation (RMA) or reducing scrap costs that are increasing exponentially due to yield and handling issues. 3. Corporate Industry 4.0 strategy does not align with the plant operation's true needs and challenges. a. Many times, for companies that are for- ward-thinking enough to put in place a corporate strategy with digital transforma- tion, the strategy and programs are owned by IT. b. We had found that often there is not enough engagement and collaboration with OT teams on the issues and chal-

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