Enterprise architecture can drive business transformation in the manufacturing industry. Let's explore the issues impacting manufacturing and how SAP LeanIX can help.
Enterprise architecture is vital for driving business transformation across both the digital and physical realms of your organization in synergy. Changing one without reflecting that change in the other is a recipe for transformation failure.
This is particularly important for the manufacturing industry. Between the need to incorporate innovative technology and automation, to the urgent importance of reshoring supply chains to increase supply chain resilience, production is a transforming industry, and you need to transform your business along with it.
In the next part of our series exploring how enterprise architecture drives business transformation across different industries, let's consider the factors impacting manufacturing. Can enterprise architecture drive transformation in production?
To find out more about how enterprise architecture and SAP LeanIX can help manufacturing companies transform and thrive, download our EA success kit:
DOWNLOAD: Success Kit - Enterprise Architecture in Manufacturing
Supply Chain Resilience Remains Front Of Mind
Enterprise architecture is vitally important for the manufacturing industry as it faces increasing pressure to rethink its architecture. From COVID to the Suez Canal obstruction, recent events have shown supply chain resilience to be an urgent priority for the world economy.
Going beyond simple business concerns, supply chain issues in manufacturing can lead to people going without essential products that they need to get by in their everyday lives. This has led manufacturing companies to redevelop their supply chains with resilience in mind.
Supply chain resilience, in this case, could mean developing a complex network of back-up supply paths to fill in for your main suppliers when unprecedented events cause disruption. On the other hand, it might mean closing factories abroad and opening new facilities closer to home in order to shorten and reshore supply chains.
Either way, ensuring resilience requires re-architecting your organization from the ground up to ensure continuity now that events have shown that our previous perception of resilience was simply an illusion. As you change the physical footprint of your factories, you'll also need to adapt your technology architecture to support your new processes.
New facilities means new machinery, new logistics processes, new servers, new operating systems, and new software applications. This level of technology transformation requires oversight and careful planning, particularly given the need to leverage new technology.
Indeed, technology already exists that could completely change the face of the manufacturing industry, and you need to be ready to incorporate bleeding-edge tech into your new supply chain or risk being left behind. Let's explore the innovations that you need to incorporate into your tech stack.
AI, VR, AR, And Other Disruptive Acronyms
Enterprise architecture is vital for incorporating innovative technology into your IT landscape. This is key for the manufacturing industry as it's set to be revolutionized by emerging technology.
Increasingly, new factories need to be 'smart factories' that leverage the latest hardware and software to maximize production and minimize costs. These smart factories incorporate all the latest manufacturing innovations, including:
1 The Internet Of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term used to describe the incorporation of communications technology into devices that don't require it as part of their function in order to form a synergized network. This means you can track how much stock your machinery is producing in real time.
2 Artificial Intelligence
Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of learning from your stock history and making informed decisions across your entire network without your input. This means your factory can order additional raw materials and create extra supply to meet demand at 3am while you're soundly asleep in your bed.
3 Virtual And Augmented Reality
Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) bring a digital element to the operation of your facilities. AR creates a digital overlay to make running manufacturing equipment as simple as using your phone, while VR allows your specialists to control equipment remotely from anywhere, allowing for the creation of 'dark factories' without any staff at all.
4 Three-Dimensional Printing
Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a new technology that allows a machine to 'print' a 3D plastic object in one piece in thin air, just like your paper printer makes inked markings on paper. This means that your factories can create finished products without the need for assembly.
5 Sustainable Production
Regulators are increasingly looking to manufacturers to cut their carbon emissions and ensure resilience. Reducing your carbon footprint requires both leveraging sustainable technology and also incorporating reporting software to ensure you can prove your efforts are successful.
Manufacturing Transformation Is Key
Enterprise architecture is about incorporating technology into your processes and achieving a true synergy between your physical and digital operations. This is an essential business capability, but it's never more important than when your organization needs to change.
Relocating factories or setting up new ones involves adding new machinery to your portfolio and new dimensions to your logistics. Like any change to your organization, this will require an adaptation of your software application portfolio in order to accommodate your new enterprise landscape.
At minimum, this will require an expansion in the number of licenses you need for your existing software, which will involve recontracting and considering economies of scale. More likely, however, you'll need to re-assess your choice of applications and update and expand your software capabilities.
When it comes to leveraging new and innovative hardware like the internet of things (IoT) or virtual reality (VR), you're going to need the latest software applications in order to utilize them. That means re-imagining your software architecture from scratch in order to properly leverage innovative software and hardware capabilities.
Often, this is why business transformations fail. Organizations focus on either transforming their operations or their technology, but the successful transformations evolve both aspects together to achieve balance and synergy rather than cause chaos by leaving the two realms out of balance.
Enterprise architecture is the discipline of achieving that precise balance between the physical and digital realms of your organization. Just as your physical manufacturing capabilities are enhanced by digital software, an enterprise architecture management platform can help you rapidly build an EA practice and maintain it to drive all your future transformations.
Leveraging SAP LeanIX Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture management in the modern era requires a digital aspect, and that's SAP LeanIX. Our platform is to enterprise architecture what Zoom was to holding meetings when the world went remote.
Attempting to do enterprise architecture in the digital age requires a digital toolset, and LeanIX was designed to be a software tool for enterprise architects. It stores all your application information and allows you to analyze and manipulate it in order to derive all the insights you need to optimize your IT landscape.
Each of your applications will have its own fact sheet storing all the information about it, including how it connects to your other applications and what hardware it supports. This allows you to build a map of your IT landscape that you can experiment with to create a vision for your ideal application portfolio and a road map of the path between the two states.
This is an essential tool for business transformation in any industry. It is, however, vital for manufacturing companies to rebuild and reshore their supply chains, and to leverage innovative new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).
To find out more about how enterprise architecture and SAP LeanIX can help manufacturing companies transform and thrive, download our EA success kit:
