Author Archives: Charing Kam

We have to be honest: the month of May passed by in a flash. With the annual SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference happening in Orlando, Florida in a week, we’ve been too preoccupied preparing for our different sessions: from our customers, Netafim and Mindray, talking about digitalized sales and business innovation, to our CEO, who will be discussing our own solutions offered on the SAP App Center during the partner summit.

This is the first in a series of Industry 4.0 posts that aim to help manufacturers take advantage of the power of innovations in manufacturing. To receive the next post in the series, sign up for our newsletter. 

In the world of manufacturing, it can be tough to get started on digitalisation due to legacy systems, skill gaps, and other complexities. Even as data becomes an important part of decision making in the future, only about half of industrial manufacturers are actively focusing on data today, per a PwC study. This means that there are plenty of bumps in the road for manufacturers who are looking at Industry 4.0 solutions, but have not been able to start on their digitalisation journey.

To provide some help, we have collated 3 spectacular success stories that every manufacturer should read:

In the world of smart factories, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Industry 4.0, it can quickly be confusing to see the difference between advances in technology. Even in the world of machine maintenance, we’ve seen robots, machine learning, and other technologies and service models appear in the span of the last few decades.

It is hence important for us to differentiate between all the terms floating around in the realm of maintenance, to ensure that manufacturers stay on the same page as technology providers. After all, if you shortened it, the abbreviation ‘PM’ could now refer to Preventive Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance, or Prescriptive Maintenance! It’s time to break down the differences between the three. 

There are many benefits to having multiple sites and sales regions: for enterprise manufacturing businesses, local sales offices and production sites make for lower costs and quicker time-to-quote.

However, the process of setting up sales offices and production sites in different countries and regions tends to create silo-ed factories and offices: most of them don’t find a need to be connected to other sites on a day to day basis, so they aren’t. Even when sites are in the same region, they may not be aware of each site’s activities, from productivity levels to sales activities.

Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA), or Life-Cycle Costing (LCC), is a common concept in the world of procurement and manufacturing: It refers to the need to analyse all ‘costs of production, installation, usage and disposal, aiming at the minimum of the total cost’, as per a 1998 research paper, ‘Product Life Cycle Costing Applied to Manufacturing Systems’.

Instead of focusing on the cheapest cost price, LCC looks at a material’s entire life cycle (hence the term), and the need to include installation, operational, maintenance, and end-of-life costs to the overall buying cost of a material.

 Were you at the Hannover Messe this past week? If you were, you would have seen some stunning innovations and technological leaps, courtesy of Industry 4.0. Moving into May, we’re thinking about our Labour Day holiday, but also excited for how companies will handle all the Industry 4.0 news below…

“Manufacturing” as a category might make up a huge part of a country’s GDP, but when you break it down, the types of products made can range from the smallest screw to the largest forklift. There are automotive manufacturers, medical equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers, engineer-to-order and make-to-order businesses…the list goes on.

It stands to reason that sales processes can differ dramatically according to the type of manufacturing as well. In this article, we will be looking at the ability to expedite the industrial B2B sales cycle for a section of manufacturers.

With Good Friday right around the corner, March ends on a holiday high. Let’s look back at the most interesting Industry 4.0 stories from this first quarter of the year, from supply woes to automotive innovations.  

As Industry 4.0 solutions have taken over the market, employees of manufacturing companies have started getting anxious about job security. The number of articles that proclaim ‘Robots/Automation will destroy our jobs!’, boosted by publishers such as The Guardian, BBC, and Wired, number in the millions (2 million results on Google and counting!).

While it is true that innovation will bring many changes to the work landscape and many roles will need to be up-skilled to stay relevant, it is also important to keep in mind that Industry 4.0 solutions will affect every role differently.

As China rose through the years as a manufacturing powerhouse, the country became synonymous with exports. ‘China used to be the world’s factory’, proclaimed Forbes, as the country overtook the United States as the world’s biggest producer of manufactured goods from 2011 onwards. In 2015, it produced ‘80% of the world’s air-conditioners, 70% of its mobile phones and 60% of its shoes’, as per The Economist. In 2016, its total Manufacturing Value-Added (MVA) was a whopping 3.25 trillion, as mentioned in our previous article on ‘Made in China 2025’.

However, along with that meteoric rise in manufacturing production came an opposing dive in China’s reputation for product quality. As early as 2007, consumers and manufacturers alike were complaining of ‘quality fade’ when it came to Chinese products, explained by Forbes as ‘the deliberate and secret habit of widening profit margins through a reduction in the quality of materials’. Basically, by reducing the quality from batch to batch, factory owners were able to cut costs and increase margins, but with many potential risks.