After months of sharing best practices around various aspects of smart manufacturing, this month’s episode brings listeners a first-hand account of a company on its SM journey. Together with the Digital Foundry team at Penn State, MSA Safety is seeing real results from their 9-month journey thus far. The process uses CESMII’s toolset to form a baseline before building a technology and organizational roadmap to address its strategic goals.

Download the full episode to learn more about your role in defining your smart manufacturing-enabled future.

Top 5 Takeaways

1. Get the right teams in place. No one person or function owns the success of smart manufacturing – make sure you include point people from OT, IT, and any other key decision-making functions within your organization.
2. Consider working with a third-party facilitator. With the goal of assessing, aligning, and then creating a multi-year roadmap, you may find that engaging an unbiased team to drive those conversations will get you to where you want to go – faster.
3. Start with the “why” before you define the “what.” Often teams want to jump into solving but if you can’t articulate the business value, then you shouldn’t be looking at technologies.
4. Collaboration and data are keys to success (again). Ultimately SM is about unlocking data and making it actionable. Today, functional teams use different languages and are influenced by different cultural drivers so getting alignment up front will ensure a strong partnership throughout the organization.
5. It’s a journey, not a sprint. Not everything will be perfect on day one, it’s important to continue learning from and evolving your SM roadmap.

CESMII’s Acceleration Framework is being rolled out nationally, empowering manufacturers, of all sizes, to clearly identify and articulate their business priorities and align short and long-term roadmap projects to build their digital capabilities. Ready to get started on your SM journey? We recommend you start with the CESMII online SM Business Practices Assessment tool. Click here to begin the assessment.