Key Takeaways:
- Manufacturing businesses are perpetually pulled in the opposing directions of optimizing operations either for today’s market conditions or for prospective future market conditions yet to come.
- To achieve both goals, businesses can apply the principles of future-proofing, which is a design and decision-making framework that embeds anticipated future needs into current managerial actions.
- By deploying future-proof integrated manufacturing, businesses stand the best chance of adapting to opportunities and challenges over the long haul.
There’s an interesting conundrum in industrial manufacturing: Production systems are almost always designed to best serve a particular product or process, whereas manufacturing businesses themselves are built to fluidly evolve alongside market and customer demands. In this way, industrial manufacturing organizations have to live “many lives” over time, despite the fact that integrated manufacturing can’t truly be built to live lives that are not yet defined.
Right about now, you’re either nodding along in agreement or feeling skeptical. We understand. On the one hand, any rational engineer will know that current performance comes from specificity. On the other hand, any strategic business leader will know that future performance comes from flexibility. Whichever you favor, you’re right.
While there’s no real way to completely solve both sides at once (as in, you can’t have a solution that is perfect for known and unknown conditions simultaneously), there is a concept in industrial manufacturing that provides the tools to get as close to both as possible. That concept is called future-proofing.
The Main Principles of Future-Proof Manufacturing
What is future-proofing, especially as it relates to industrial manufacturing?
In this context, future-proofing is a design and decision framework that seeks to anticipate future needs and reflect those needs in current actions. The goal is to minimize the negative impacts of future conditions yet to come.
At first read, you might conflate future-proofing with simple demand forecasting: That would not be entirely correct. Demand forecasting is purely about predicting growth in volume. Future-proofing is much more involved, solving for fundamental changes in a business that may encompass new products, new processes, new compliance requirements and much more.
To get the full picture, here are the main principles of future-proof manufacturing:
- Process flexibility: Systems should be designed so that they can be reconfigured in the future (in terms of products, recipe steps, parameter setpoints, formats and physical layout), even when the future configuration isn’t known.
- Connected systems: Systems should also be designed for interoperation and communication (i.e., real-time status, safety, performance, maintenance and alarm monitoring), such that future reconfigurations can be achieved mostly digitally.
- Automation: Future system modifications are infinitely easier to roll out through automation than purely physical rebuilds, most notably for recipe, process sequence, critical control point, compliance and recordkeeping changes.
- Adaptable, scalable capacity: Many businesses will experience scale changes before wholesale product line changes over their lifetime, which makes building for adaptable capacities a major function of future-proofing.
- Self-sustaining practices: Thinking more broadly, future-proofing is also a path to ensuring long-range business viability, which adds sustainable business practices, ongoing workforce development and waste reduction into the mix.
Designing Integrated Manufacturing With Future-Proof Features
How can manufacturers best adopt the principles of future-proofing in their business? Well, we gave half the answer away with the title of this section; by upgrading existing or deploying new integrated manufacturing specifically designed with future-proof features, such as:
- Modular construction: Manufacturers should build systems in a modular fashion, which means that sections of the system can be easily replaced, expanded or reconfigured independently without impacting the wider process.
- Standardized components: Construct systems using standardized components, means and methods, and design details, so that future adjustments are simply an effort in reapplying the same standards (not reinventing the wheel).
- Fully automated controls: Use automated controls wherever possible to make future changes a breeze, including PACs, online recipe/inventory/sequence management systems and configurable networked instruments and devices.
- Centralized recipe management: Further to the above point, centralize recipe, inventory and operational management systems to cloud-based or on-premise platforms, which makes rolling out process-wide changes a one-click exercise.
- Energy efficiency: Always assume that energy and resource costs will be higher in the future, which makes investments in energy-efficient components a key future-proofing solution.
Here’s another way to look at future-proofing: Down the road, your business may face a time when production processes must drastically change to meet emergent conditions. If you don’t, the business may not survive.
In such an event, the best-case scenario is that your manufacturing systems are fully integrated and future-proofed to the point that making the change is not just survivable, but quickly rewarding. From this perspective, future-proofing is the way to go.
We know that this is an extreme example. More than likely, your business will face less-drastic challenges over time, but the point remains the same: Anywhere that you can apply the principles of future-proofing in your manufacturing operation today offsets the burden of natural market conditions yet to come.
To talk more about future-proofing new manufacturing applications or existing process systems, please contact us.
