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VIEWS, PERSPECTIVES AND READERS’ LETTERS
Deliver value to industry through technology transfer
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uite brilliantly, South Carolina leveraged the textile industry success and an experienced manufacturing workforce to transition to high-tech advanced manufacturing. Home to over 6,500 manufacturing companies employing over 250,000 people, manufacturers must innovate, CATHERINE adopt new techHAYES nology, retool, and retrain their workforce to remain competitive in the global economy. From engineers to CEOs, we hear the urgency to “race to innovate to stay competitive.” From benchmarking in SCRA’s Corporate Innovation Forum, we see similar innovation challenges resurface across industry verticals – despite differences in volumes, product mix, and supply chains - and innovation best practices can be shared.
nal experts from the start more quickly drive successful technology adoption across their value chain. Through these partnerships, smaller tech firms validate their solutions before scaling and larger companies gain quick access to technical expertise, mitigate the risk, and realize the ROI.
Pilot project at SC manufacturer
Roadmap for Industry 4.0
A critical innovation challenge manufacturers face today is how to define the strategic vision and roadmap for digital transformation or Industry 4.0, whether improving operations at the plant level or transforming business across the enterprise. Do you take a top-down, vision-oriented approach, or a bottom-up, lean, and value stream approach? Best practices from industry partners suggest you should incorporate views from both perspectives and align your leadership and your practitioners to maximize return on investment. Industry 4.0 isn’t an event; it’s a commitment to a journey of technology assessments, trials, adoption, and integration. Leadership must understand the opportunities and threats of this journey and commit the capital, training, and operational resources to assure successful technology transfer.
Technology choices
After defining an Industry 4.0 roadmap, it’s not the “cool factor” that should drive technology choices. Shiny new tech may dazzle some in the press, but manufacturers need to pilot and scale technologies that drive improved performance, reduce costs, and deliver value to their customers. Key personnel considerations dictate the approach you use to pilot, deploy, integrate and maintain new technology. Do you have the technical resources in-house, and will you provide
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the technical training required to achieve value from this digital transformation? Do you develop and implement these new technologies with your own resources, do you acquire them, or do you partner with external vendors? Depending on their strategy, many companies choose to partner with smaller technology firms, often startups, to contain costs and to reduce time to value.
Tech transfer model
SCRA’s SC Industry Solutions developed a model to facilitate technology transfer from smaller tech firms to larger companies, which lowers the cost and risk of development and facilitates technology adoption and integration from pilot to scale. After engaging industry leaders to understand their technical needs, we scout the entrepreneurial community
to identify technology-based solutions, facilitate the match from technology company to corporate partner, assist to define a realistic scope and scalable pilot, provide funding with a corporate partner match, and monitor the project milestones to achieve defined deliverables. Through technology transfer, SCRA supports manufacturers’ success by facilitating access to emerging technologies, academic discoveries, and entrepreneurial products and services. I heard a startling statistic last year: Only half of all corporate pilots ever scale. We’ve learned from deploying our tech transfer model that tactical pilots drive more cost-effective solutions than complex plant-wide deployments. The companies that engage cross-functional teams to design and implement a scalable pilot project and partner with exter-
Recently, a large, industrial manufacturer approached us looking for a scalable, artificial intelligence solution to predictive maintenance on multiple machines at multiple plants. Through the SCRA model and associated Demonstration Grant, we supported the partnership with a small tech firm that leverages its expertise in manufacturing processes to apply predictive maintenance and predictive quality models. Although the manufacturer could have developed these skills and tools in-house, the support of external experts with machine learning knowledge and pre-developed templates expedited the learning curve, exposed the integration challenges, and reduced the time to value. Bridging the corporate and entrepreneurial cultures can be tricky. Software engineers and data scientists have unique skill sets that don’t always align with manufacturing objectives. Startups must learn manufacturing lingo, set realistic expectations of what their technology does and does not accomplish, and understand the integration requirements to achieve smooth technology transfer and adoption. Beyond proving the technology works, both companies must consider operational costs, maintenance requirements, technical training, and workforce acceptance to assure successful adoption. By structuring realistic pilot projects to facilitate tech transfer, both the small tech company and the larger corporate partner learn the process to introduce, implement, and deploy the new technology, thereby avoiding costly mistakes and mitigating the risk of failed adoption. Catherine Hayes is industry manager for the S.C. Research Authority.
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Email: rnorton@scbiznews.com
