When a product moves from one process to another in an unstructured way, production becomes a complex process. Add increasing demand for custom products, smaller lot sizes, extremely short lifecycles and new technologies built into products, and you’ve only named a handful of the challenges that discrete industry businesses are faced with today.
One word sums up the #1 characteristic needed to survive and thrive in discrete manufacturing: flexibility. Times are changing, technology is evolving at ever-faster rates, and those businesses unable to embrace creative new ways of using data, supporting innovation, streamlining processes and integrating their equipment with their ERP systems risk losing their competitive edge – and their profitability.
3 biggest challenges in the discrete industry
While automation and digitization are tough to tackle in every sector, discrete manufacturing comes with highly specific challenges that must be addressed with industry-tailored IT solutions by an experienced partner.
1. Production planning: to produce customized products flexibly and rapidly while keeping minimal stock at hand, companies must find new ways to be creative with the tools at their disposal.
2. Product complexity: businesses should be able to design products that are both produced flexibly, but that have many options themselves, even in the face of ever shorter product lifecycles.
3. Traceability: every step of the production process must be transparent through machine integration with multiple systems.
We understand the importance of your company history and the specific needs of your industry when it comes to developing an effective IT solution that truly enables efficiency. Our in-house FAST-Engineer™ template, based on standard SAP S/4HANA, targets discrete industry businesses of all sizes interested in operational excellence. Our FAST-Engineer solution enables: