The Journey to a Digital Factory Part I

From Levers & Spreadsheets to Automation & Digitization

This whitepaper will discuss the attributes of a digital factory as well as key factors and steps for users either in the process of creating a digital factory (enterprise) or as part of the vision statement for productivity improvements. Various surveys (e.g. 2022 State of Manufacturing Report) show over 90% of manufacturing and process industries are investing in digital factories. This can be a daunting task as many of the operations and engineering personnel assigned to the task are experts in their field of production and not necessarily IT/OT type of experts. With a huge market potential, there are hundreds if not thousands of suppliers clamoring to help these experts, but this also creates a large amount of confusion on how to proceed and concerns about proceeding down paths that may be dead ends, have high maintenance costs, captive vendor syndrome issues and/or just do not meet the intended goals.

This series of white papers will discuss many of these decision points and key facets of successful projects. Our next white papers will go into more detail providing links for examples and guides to ease one along the journey.