Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1265351
74 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2020 I have the traceability into where it came from and where it was used. That's something that has eluded the government for a good while, but between the challenges we see today and the technologies that are available, we'll begin to see a better ability to provide that lineage for those items. Johnson: Is tracking the supply chain enough? Does that help create resiliency? Peters: There are a number of aspects to resil- iency. Resiliency is the ability to withstand a disruption and continue operations or to adapt in the face of those disruptions. There are ways and tools to do it. Forty years ago, you used to have everything integrated. Management sat on the second floor and looked over the shop floor and saw what was happening; if there was a problem with the line, and the red light went off, they would go down and resolve it. There are tools now where companies can do that. They are able to have that same kind of interaction very quickly, but those are more advanced companies. What I'm seeing now are disjointed efforts that have a contract in place and exchange some information. Aside from that, there isn't visibility into what's happening. I can't look into their manufacturing line and see that my product is being produced or look at the pro- duction rate and recognize whether they are 30% behind and are never going to make the delivery date. That's where you see a lot of focus on the whole idea of Industry 4.0 or the factory of the future. Many of those tools are all about getting us back to where somebody at the management level can look across the floor and understand what's going on in that opera- tion, whether it's within their organization or a supplier's operation. We're starting to see a payoff for the adoption of Industry 4.0, or factory of the future, that either addresses those issues or provides much more resilience in the supply chain because there's much greater communication. It can still be accomplished by integrating, but chal- lenges remain that have kept us from doing it for a good while. One of those is the global supply chain. You hear a lot of people talking about the idea that we need to bring all the production back to the U.S. and do it all within our borders. There's value to some of that, but there are reasons that you have the distribu- tor supply chain. The supply chain needs to be designed based on your desired outcome. You want to produce things close to the point of distribution or consumption. I might need suppliers in the U.S., but also some in Europe or Asia or in other parts of the world. With that in mind, I still need some means of see- ing across the companies that are in my sup- ply chain and know what's happening. There is a lot of interest in integration, but the more likely solution is going to be leveraging new tools and technologies that give you those same benefits of integration without requiring the physical location of a place. Johnson: I grew up in Beaverton, Oregon— the home of Tektronix. That company was a shining example of vertical integration. They made everything—even machine screws and knobs—at the campus. We have moved to the other end of the spectrum over the years, and it's the data that will allow us to get a vertically integrated-type view of the details in the sup- ply chain without having to return to a com- pletely vertically integrated company structure. Peters: Exactly. The holy grail of all of this Industry 4.0 is that you have machines talking to each other so that they can keep each other apprised as to what's happening. But you're also providing much more data to humans to make more informed decisions. For exam- ple, you could know that three layers down in my supply chain for widget XYZ, there's a problem; they're falling behind, and there's some kind of increased vibration in one of the machines, so they have to take it down. I could know those things in advance, and then my smart systems using AI and other data can look at how long it's going to take to repair and make a decision very quickly, such as we're counting on that unit for 30 production units a day. I can shift my work over to another company in a different location, continue