The pandemic has acted as yet another wake up call for manufacturing, making evident that this industry cannot continue to operate on the systems and methods in place prior to the COVID-19 crisis. Manufacturing must move even further and faster towards the aim of greater agility and higher efficiency. Adoption of a digital-first business model will help manufacturing achieve those aims and will ready the industry for a post-COVID era where customer and stakeholder expectations will continue to become more demanding even in the face of increased socio-economic headwinds.

Factories are increasingly connected, as machines talk to one another and collaborate with humans. Automation and autonomy reach new milestones, as robots and machines become more independent, mobile and increasingly take on more humanistic attributes. As manufacturing embraces the digital age, factories are as much the purveyors of material goods as they are producers, consumers, and even sellers of data and information.

Emerging technology drives performance and agility within manufacturing operations to better address changes in customer demands. New technologies have changed the face of manufacturing in numerous ways — for example, how blockchain traceability platforms have enabled food safety throughout the supply chain, or how warehouses leverage IoT to track assets throughout facilities to improve response times and optimize labor and capital usage. In this changing landscape, factories that don’t innovate quickly enough – or at all – will be left behind.

Manufacturers must now cross a new threshold as they seek innovative ways to use emerging technologies to make their work flows and supply chains smarter, faster and more efficient. Hundreds if not thousands of digital and technological innovations have been introduced to manufacturing in the last decade alone. But digitization and automation are solutions, not strategies – manufacturers must anchor their embrace of these innovations to audacious and differentiating strategic objectives: near perfect on time delivery, double-digit labor or asset productivity rates, or a zero-defect customer experience. With clarity on the outcomes sought, the right innovation can be selected, integrated, and applied to new ways of working that produce higher margins, better quality, and higher returns on the manufacturing asset.

Some ways in which leading companies have navigated the journey from traditional manufacturing to digitally transformed smart factory operations include