Bottom line: Manufacturers today are facing the global challenges of staying in step with increasingly complex customer requirements while accelerating product development and reducing costs. Excelling on these three dimensions is going to require an entirely new level of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Manufacturing Intelligence (MI) and analytics performance.
The following top 10 predictions for 2016 illustrate just how fast Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and complex manufacturing are changing today and will accelerate in the future:
Prediction 1: Analytics and Manufacturing Intelligence will reorder the complex manufacturing landscape and drive much-needed change into entire value chains, bringing new levels of accuracy, clarity and precision to complex supplier, buyer and customer interactions. 2016 is going to be a pivotal year in complex manufacturing as analytics and manufacturing intelligence deliver greater insights into areas where companies can improve quickly. Moving beyond analytics that report the past, 2016 is going to be a break-out year for advanced, predictive analytics and Manufacturing Intelligence that uses solid frameworks including Six Sigma, Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve Control (DMAIC) and others.
Prediction 2: Speed, time-to-market and the onslaught of customized, engineer-to-order products will continue to motivate manufacturers to adopt Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) capable of scaling to serve their global operations.
Prediction 3: Current and next generation Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) will be designed for assist complex manufacturers attain higher levels of internal and external compliance and quality management through integrated, enterprise-wide process control strategies and techniques. Quality is on its way to a strategic framework, breaking out of its siloed legacy in many complex manufacturers.
Prediction 4: Complex manufacturers are going to accelerate how quickly they replace siloed homegrown, legacy and third-party systems with integrated MES and quality management systems that provide enterprise-wide visibility of the cost of quality and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Driven by customers’ increasingly complex and urgent requirements, many manufacturers aren’t going to have any choice but to become more automated.
Prediction 5: Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) will provide greater control over every aspect of digitizing interactive work instructions using 2D and 3D CAD drawings and visualizations to providing real-time updates and data collection. Work instructions will include video content as well, providing a complete information toolkit to each operator, ensuring manufacturing stays synchronized, focused and productive.
Prediction 6: Complex manufacturers who had been constrained by manual processes will adopt new MES systems in 2016 and upgrade existing ones to reduce the chaotic clutter of paperwork with the accuracy, precision and quality of online work instructions and processes accessible across all production centers.
Prediction 7: MES will become more agile, capable of aligning to entirely new business processes, workflows and procedures by providing greater product and process customization to the shop floor level than is possible
Prediction 8: Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) will be increasingly forced to scale up and support multisite, globally deployed production planning, supplier coordination, compliance and quality management initiatives that span the entire value chains.
Prediction 9: Distributed algorithms being fine-tuned in Hadoop today will be applied to solve complex supply chain scenarios that are global in scope, making the vision of supply chain optimization achievable across the spectrum of production strategies. From make-to-stock to engineer-to-order, applying these advanced algorithms to complex sourcing and supply chain problems will drive up perfect order performance while reducing out-of-stock conditions and improve supply chain collaboration. For many manufactures this will open up the opportunity to make their supply chains demand-driven for the first time.
Prediction 10: Scalable, secure cloud platforms emerging across the complex manufacturing landscape will see accelerating adoption in 2016. Manufacturers are adopting these platforms to replace legacy systems of limited use to their current business models while creating a more unified manufacturing execution strategy that provides more accurate, predictive manufacturing intelligence and analytics as well.
