Production line quality, throughput, and utilization are familiar pressures to those who manage shop floors. They’re not new challenges – they’ve been around for decades.
However, new market requirements and new technologies call for a different perspective on these allegedly familiar topics.
As a result of our efforts to optimize our own factories, we’ve gained experience in adapting production to latest market requirements by using new technologies in the right context. In particular, we learned that:
- Bringing traditional optimization topics like quality, throughput, and utilization in perspective to business goals helps to justify necessary investments in advanced technologies
- A stronger customer focus calls for more individualized production (smaller lot sizes) at the same cost as mass production
- Mass production cost levels can only be reached by integrating advanced technologies like AI
- Harnessing new technologies requires a co-creation approach
