How Smart Manufacturing is Similar to Lean Manufacturing

That would be a great quote from Booz Allen, if it weren’t slightly ahead of its time. New machines want to speak to us and want to be part of orchestrated processes in the factory, but we are not there yet. The mission ahead for Smart Manufacturing initiatives is to make it happen and realize the enormous potential from new levels of synchronization spanning from product design to order, realization, and delivery.
Smart Manufacturing can be viewed as a process improvement movement complementary to the Lean Manufacturing movement of the past two decades. Lean Manufacturing initiatives design out the overburden, inconsistencies and waste to achieve enhanced processes that deliver products smoothly and consistently. In contrast, Smart Manufacturing initiatives are bringing the physical and digital worlds together designing in connectivity and orchestration to achieve enhanced processes that deliver products and their data smoothly and consistently to customers. Going forward, both Lean and Smart Manufacturing will be interrelated improvement efforts in the manufacturing value chain.
There are eight types of disconnectivity in the manufacturing value chain that need to be eliminated as organizations embark on the Smart Manufacturing journey to synchronize, automate and optimize the physical and digital processes.
Each of the communication and process participants listed in this slideshow need to be systematically connected to achieve the desired Smart Manufacturing goals, which we discussed in the prior article titled: “On the Journey to a Smart Manufacturing Revolution.”