Hitachi Vantara Manufacturing Day 2019 Executive Blog

By Sanjay Chikarmane posted 10-03-2019 16:04

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Manufacturing Transformation for the Year Ahead
Manufacturing Day Resolutions for Accelerated Outcomes from Manufacturing 4.0
By Sanjay Chikarmane, SVP of Product Management for IoT & Analytics, Hitachi Vantara

What a difference a year makes. In last year’s Manufacturing Day blog post, Brad talked about how important data science is to gleaning the insights you need to transform your manufacturing enterprise. Since then, that strategic necessity has escalated. Volatility in the global economic climate, geopolitical tensions, and issues related to global trade and tariffs are all having an impact on the manufacturing sector. Now is the time to double down on business agility, gain insights and maximize your return on data and to minimize the negative impact of these external issues on your business and your community.

Unfortunately, even though data is being collected, yet manufacturers are not fully applying it to bring benefits to the business. The World Economic Forum reports that 70% of production data isn’t being used.i] Why not? Because digital transformation isn’t just about technology — it’s also about skills transformation and culture. If your organization isn’t getting the greatest return on data, you need to look at enabling an analytics architecture, prioritizing use cases that can drive transformative change and driving change bottoms-up.

Insights can be liberating and enable the organization to challenge status quo. That may sound extreme but taking a hard look at internal processes and how decisions are made can lead to changes that create business value. Transformative changes can be disruptive, but they can also lead to transformative outcomes —and those outcomes must be aligned with driving business value.

Your journey is your own
Your transformational digital journey is unique to your enterprise. A road map that plots the course for your journey will help you drive insights and make sure you migrate safely and securely. Your progress will be determined by the course you set and the solutions you use to meet your organization’s specific needs. You need to start with a digital innovation foundation that will help drive transformative outcomes across the business.

Although you can work toward incremental improvements, you can make exponential progress by prioritizing your use cases around convergence of Ishikawa’s 4Ms (machine, man, material and method). Some of these use cases can be focused on creating a competitive advantage, and others can be targeted toward operational efficiency. Combined, you can get the maximum return on your data by gleaning valuable insights that will exponentially accelerate your digital transformation journey.

For example, over the past year, we’ve launched several initiatives that have helped our clients accelerate their intelligent manufacturing journey, including:

Applying machine and process analytics to help a 5G company identify root-cause factors, allowing them to eliminate data silos, reduce bottlenecks and prepare for tenfold increases in new product introductions.
Leveraging descriptive and predictive analytics to optimize production and improve quality and environmental index scores for a leading aluminum manufacturer, resulting in accelerated bottom-line improvements.
Deploying production optimization and video analytics to help a leading upstream oil and gas company enhance operational economics and improve safety, resulting in minimized downtime and maximized operational performance.

Whatever solutions you choose to power your journey, make sure you’re including a mix of applications and services that’s right for your operation. Out-of-the-box solutions can get you started quickly, and you can also co-create your solution with a trusted partner to help ensure that you are using approaches that most effectively your competitive advantage.

The tools for digital innovation
At Hitachi Vantara, we focus on helping our clients get the greatest return on their data. We give you the tools and methodologies for revealing crucial insights to achieve your desired business outcomes. For example, our industrial analytics solution enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) can provide the digital innovation foundation that's essential to Manufacturing 4.0. These solutions include:

Lumada Manufacturing Insights. Bring the 4Ms into the digital age to drive productivity, uptime and quality gains across a spectrum of use cases.
Lumada Video Insights. Use video analytics to gain operational and business intelligence with a 360-degree view of your operations.
Lumada Maintenance Insights. Optimize asset maintenance, reduce overall repair times, increase uptime, and extend the life of assets.

In addition, to better serve our customers and our partners, Hitachi Vantara is combining our capabilities with that of Hitachi Consulting Corporation. Under a shared strategy and operating model, we can rapidly increase the pace of innovation and mitigate digital transformation risks at the same time.

How will you drive your transformational journey?
Are you getting the insights you need to maximize the return from your data? How will you welcome in the new manufacturing year, prepare for the changes to come and drive greater agility across your business?

Wherever you are on your journey to digital transformation, we can help. Hitachi’s industrial analytics solutions encompass machines, production, and quality, and serve a wide variety of business needs and goals. Our co-creation services build on our IT and OT experience to help you achieve greater business and operational impact and a faster time to value. On Manufacturing Day, we not only welcome the next-generation workforce to be part of the exciting transformations in manufacturing but also reaffirm our commitment to provide next generation solutions and services that will help our customers achieve excellence.

We’d like to help you achieve your goals and make the coming year a great one. The year ahead for manufacturing will be about business and infrastructure agility, led by data agility. I invite you to join us at Hitachi Next 2019 to see how we can help you accelerate and amplify your return on data.

Learn more about manufacturing operations solutions from Hitachi.