6 minute read
How is digitalization impacting manufacturing?
Special report: Michael Colarossi at Avery Dennison RBIS details how and why manufacturing companies need to embrace digitalization.
The manufacturing industry is evolving at pace today in order to stay agile and competitive, writes Michael Colarossi, Product Line Management, and Sustainability at Avery Dennison RBIS.
Michael Colarossi, Product Line Management, and Sustainability
Digitalization presents a steep learning curve, but manufacturing industry leaders today recognise the urgent need to invest in Manufacturing 4.0 technologies. With supply chain disruption and global economic and political upheavals impacting every sector, staying competitive is more challenging than ever, meaning the race to digitalize must go up a gear.
So how is a manufacturer like Avery Dennison approaching digitalization? As a starting point, we recognise the value of digitally connected operations bringing data to the forefront of decisionmaking. This is what’s driving the shift in how operations work across our global business.
Advances in technology and smart manufacturing are reshaping our business and delivering cost and efficiency savings. We are a company that manufactures an incredibly wide range of products including care labels for apparel, tags and packaging, and adhesives. We also have a large division that deals with supply chain intelligence and data collection through RFID technology.
We operate hundreds of thousands of manufacturing platforms across a family of sector-specific divisions. So, leveraging data and smart manufacturing is critical to our success in delivering to our customers. Smart manufacturing is all about connecting processes
digitally with other networks, enabling machines to automate and produce independently and ultra-efficiently.
Our aim is to make tasks more efficient and we’re making tasks more effective, leveraging data to drive better decision-making. Whether that’s in the production of physical goods, quality checks, or communication with our downstream suppliers, it’s the connectivity that counts.
We aren’t doing this alone, and it’s vital to be curious if you want to embrace the digital future. Early in our journey, we consulted other organisations that were further ahead on their journey to digitalize manufacturing, with the aim to learn from their experiences.
As an organisation, we’ve also embraced the concept of “minimum viable products”, allowing us to quickly test a concept, learn and improve. This iterative approach has been essential to our journey and will be foundational to how we continue to improve. Focus is equally critical, and we’ve embraced our digital journey while remaining focused on developing and expanding our core capabilities, to introduce new material innovations and solutions for our customers and end consumers.
Special report: Michael Colarossi at Avery Dennison RBIS details how and why manufacturing companies need to embrace digitalization.
The impact of digitalization
For us, digitalization is affecting manufacturing in the following ways:
• Customer experience
This encompasses everything from how Avery Dennison engages with its brand customers, to how it designs its products, and how it tailors products to enhance the customer experience. For example, we’ve embraced digital sampling, partnering with external organisations to eliminate the lengthy and wasteful process of physical samples.
We’ve adopted 3D manufacturing in some cases, to produce prototype parts for clients to test in their manufacturing processes. While some of these enhancements remain in the testing stage, the ambition is to bring them to scale in an industrial manufacturing setting.
• Changing the solutions and products that are entering the market
Digitalising our solutions creates an opportunity for Avery Dennison to generate value that extends beyond a label. With the scan of a smartphone, our digital labelling technology can unlock direct-touser digital experiences.
Our intelligent labelling technology, including RFID, drives supply chain efficiency, improves transparency, and enhances product authenticity. And some of our digital solutions, like digital care labels, can enable sustainability and circularity by providing product information that makes recycling, resale, and “take back” programs a reality.
• Manufacturing efficiency vs. effectiveness
Oftentimes, when organisations consider digitizing manufacturing, the core question is: how are we going to drive greater efficiency across our manufacturing platforms? At Avery Dennison, instead, we are asking, “how will digitalizing manufacturing help us be more effective in servicing our customers?” The focus on effectiveness and customers changes the conversation. Digitalising our platforms will enable far greater flexibility.
We’re also interested in using and leveraging data more effectively throughout the supply chain to plan better, source better, execute better, cut waste, and get faster. Focusing on effectiveness also changes the investment conversation focusing on technology to assist employees allows them to focus on the quality of the products that are produced.
• Leveraging tech like AI
Another key impact on manufacturing is AI (artificial intelligence) and Machine Learning which can help manufacturers monitor operations in real-time, spot inefficiencies as and when they occur, and forecast accurate delivery dates. We are also exploring how this technology can optimise quality and product development, using data to focus quality control on key failure points or improve how we design product experiments.
AI systems also enable predictive analytics, which can address operational challenges and disruptions to supply chains. McKinsey research suggests that AI can improve forecasting accuracy in manufacturing by 10-20%, which translates to a 5% reduction in inventory costs and a 2-3% increase in revenues. It’s no wonder AI is of such interest to the manufacturing sector.
Examples of digitization - Fashion in focus
We operate a very customized business. Everything we make is tailored to our customers so digitization is very helpful in the customisation process, speeding up what we can deliver. A lot of our output is for the fashion sector, which is highly time and demand-sensitive, so it makes sense for us to be able to make products in line with their essential just-in-time strategies. And in recent years we’ve developed software platforms and hardware that enables our customers to make their own products on demand, for instance, heat-transfer applications on t-shirts.
I’m especially excited about innovations we’ve achieved in intelligent labels for the apparel sector. Avery Dennison’s Intelligent Labels are a suite of IOT-enabling technologies that authenticate product history, provide tracking and inventory solutions and conjure richer consumer encounters. We’re operating today in a world of big data and massive amounts of information, so Intelligent Labels help create certainty, showing how a connected world can be a better world, full of greater possibilities.
Avery Dennison is the new official supplier for names, numbers and sleeve badges for the Premier League. The agreement places emphasis on technology and sustainability and will see Avery Dennison use technology to increase efficiency and sustainability through reduced waste, using water-based inks, and creating a “closed loop” configuration whereby plastics used in the application of the product are collected and re-enter the supply chain.
These kinds of advances in understanding and learning from digital data allow manufacturers to move from being reactive to problems when they occur, to predicting and preventing failures before they happen. The gains being made from these learnings of behaviour from data are preventing operational delays and being replicated at scale across industries.
R&D, and getting value from any investment, remains important. This is critical for projecting the ROI of the technology and meeting the needs of those hoping to benefit from it. n
