We help your business to turn your operations into a competitive advantage by leveraging digital across your value chain — from supply chain to manufacturing and product development.

Industry 4.0 - Digital operations

Industry 4.0 encompasses end-to-end digitisation and data integration of the value chain.

Through Industry 4.0, we support clients to shape their digital product and service offerings, operate a connected supply chain and digitise factories and shop floor operations as well as automate all core operations and back-office activities.

Generating, analysing and communicating data seamlessly underpins the value of Industry 4.0, which networks a wide range of new digital technologies to create competitive advantage. Mastering digital operations requires a deep understanding of collaboration, the commitment of top management, and a clear strategy - without these key elements, companies will struggle to embrace this radical, but critical change.

We work with our clients to provide solutions that address problems like:

"I don’t have transparency on our global inventory levels and customer orders."
"We still have too much paperwork in our production – we need to be more lean and efficient."
"I often have downtimes in production in the worst period – would be great to predict and schedule maintenance upfront."
"I cannot provide reliable production forecasts as our production assets are not connected and report back current status in real-time."
"We cannot deliver our promise on delivery times, because what we plan is not reflecting the production and supplier capacity."

Smart Factory

Digital and emerging technologies enable manufacturing companies to solve traditional operational problems in completely new ways. In the course of the smart factory transformation, companies are deploying a number of key technologies to digitise production as well their entire supply chain. A key concept of smart factory is “Connect & Optimize”. These include big data analytics solutions, end-to-end, real time planning and connectivity autonomous systems, digital twinning and worker augmentation, among many others. These technologies provide significant efficiency gains and allow companies to produce highly customised products, often at lot size one.

The smart factory transformation requires a great deal of knowledge-building (analytics potential, integration considerations, ecosystem awareness, business case realities, etc) to be able to define the future architecture and how new and legacy capabilities /systems will support the vision and strategy. By adopting an agile, fail-fast/succeed-faster mentality that quickly exposes the organization and key stakeholders to the learning curves allows companies to adopt the new innovations to their environments.

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Connected Supply Chain

The supply chain today is a series of largely discrete, siloed steps taken through marketing, product development, manufacturing, and distribution, and finally into the hands of the customer. Digitization brings down those walls, and the chain becomes a completely integrated ecosystem that is fully transparent to all the players involved — from the suppliers of raw materials, components, and parts, to the transporters of those supplies and finished goods, and finally to the customers demanding fulfillment.

This network will depend on a number of key technologies: integrated planning and execution systems, logistics visibility, autonomous logistics, smart procurement and warehousing, spare parts management, and advanced analytics. The result will enable companies to react to disruptions in the supply chain, and even anticipate them, by fully modeling the network, creating “what-if” scenarios, and adjusting the supply chain in real time as conditions change.

Once built — and the components are starting to be developed today — the digital supply “network” will offer a new degree of resiliency and responsiveness enabling companies that get there first to beat the competition in the effort to provide customers with the most efficient and transparent service delivery.

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Connected Supply Chains

More demanding customer requirements and new technologies in the area of digitization drive the need for an evolution of traditional supply chains towards connected, smart, and highly efficient supply chain ecosystems that proactively manage and efficiently fulfill customer needs across multiple channels.

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Angelo Estrera

Partner, Advisory, Managed Services Lead, PwC Australia

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