Improving Time to Value through Smart Manufacturing

In the manufacturing sector, Time to Value is a fundamental parameter, governing the relationship between customers and suppliers. Since, as is often the case in the world of terms borrowed from the English-speaking market, the definition has several facets, we specify that in this article we will deal with outward Time to Value, that is, the time taken by customers to receive, perceive and put into revenue the added value of our products.

Why is Time to Value so important?

As we have already pointed out, market changes are increasingly abrupt, even in industries with a strong conservative connotation such as manufacturing. This means that while customer loyalty used to be able to somewhat make up for inefficiencies along the value chain, today competition and market changes have exponentially elevated the risk of abandonment by old and new customers.

This implies that even parameters that were once secondary, such as the difficulty of adopting our products, are now critical. In other words, if our solution is more “difficult” or “laborious” than that of competitors or the market average, customers are very likely to abandon it.

The concept of Time to Value originated in digital services, where the absence of a material counterpart makes customer volatility very high, but because of increasingly fluid markets and increasingly agile systems it is extending to industries such as manufacturing.

• Improvement of services related to service and support: undoubtedly one of the most critical areas in manufacturing is the ability to communicate and provide service and support after the sale of the product, often due to internal communication problems. One of the prerogatives of smart manufacturing is precisely to make communications permeable, in effect also making interaction between departments and thus all aspects of service more efficient.
• Ability to train customers (and staff) in advance: when the company needs to introduce a new product to the market, or a revamped version of an existing product, one of the key issues is to show potential persuasively. Thanks to smart manufacturing and the aforementioned communication efficiency aspect, marketing and sales can work virtually simultaneously with production lines. In many cases it is possible to start seminars, training and promotion well in advance, even at the same time as prototyping. Techniques such as digital twin in fact make it possible to work in a virtual environment, with features absolutely faithful to the material counterpart, even during the design phases. Moreover, thanks to SAP technology, it is possible to manage these communication flows in concert and organically throughout the organizational and production chain.
• Receiving and taking in feedback and guidance: the characteristics of the smart factory today are not limited to flexibility and the ability to communicate effectively throughout the supply chain. The ability to listen to the market is another fundamental and necessary parameter for being able to maintain competitiveness. Again, the ability to take advantage of advanced analysis, simulation and production tools makes it much more agile and effective to take in feedback and guidance. For example, if a new series of a product is prone to a particular type of failure that did not show up in testing, tools such as SAP management control can be used to implement different types of remediation, ranging from service training to recall campaigns, through reduction or stop production, to redesign and re-marketing. Compatible with the characteristics of the company, all of this can be done extremely quickly and with considerable effectiveness.

Smart manufacturing is value-added friendly

We have seen three of the main aspects in which smart manufacturing proves successful in improving Time to Value, but there are also others that deserve mention if nothing else. For example, service personalization: simple arrangements such as a dynamic customer area linked to business processes can enable customers to keep track of history, supply status, and availability of spare parts and service. Industry 4.0 supply chains can facilitate interaction processes, automating the most onerous aspects of them and allowing, in the case of complex supply chains, to ensure high levels of both efficiency and product quality. Finally, especially in the case of advanced deployments such as servitization, the use of smart technologies, such as machine learning and IIoT, can enable our company to step into the customer’s needs in an effective, functional and, above all, timely manner, enabling levels of Time to Value that are impossible with traditional analog supply chains.