Collaborative Manufacturing is Becoming a Reality

The concept of Collaborative Manufacturing has been attempted in the past and successfully with Toyota and others but the time has come for a change that will enable an ecosystem of small agile manufacturers to form a “product value chain”. So lets start with what is Collaborative Manufacturing:

In Collaborative Manufacturing, designated individuals and organizations – both internal to a manufacturing enterprise and extended to its suppliers, customers, and partners – work together for mutual gain. The objectives of Collaborative Manufacturing are to streamline end-to-end business and supply chain processes and provide a more comprehensive and

accurate information base from which to make decisions.

Collaborative Manufacturing allows multiple groups to act together as they set plans and policy, agree to actions, and execute operations. Collaborative Manufacturing can boost responsiveness, agility, and customer-centricity. It also fosters the most cost-effective methods to design, source, make, deliver, and service standard, mass-customized or to-order products.

An effective Collaborative Manufacturing strategy requires business processes to include more inputs and interactions than most traditional processes. To support Collaborative Manufacturing, information systems must integrate and aggregate information from across the manufacturing business and from its suppliers, trading partners, and customers. It must also provide the means to intelligently distribute that information across various business entities.

So why now what is different?

Key to me is that fact that small enterprises can now leverage “Managed service” in the cloud that deliver the rich operational business capability of inventory management, operational process and manufacturing, and specification management which was only available to much larger companies. Now an end to end product chain can be developed with aligned a process and enable a product manufacturer to divided up over multiple operations, each operation executed by a small manufacturing entity.

The transparency of the product manufacturer across the sites all using “managed services “ in the cloud for ERP/ Order fulfillment, and MES operations / quality etc., provides the visibility to enable this agility. Effectively one Product Manufacturing chain (route) is been executed updated on a particular site as the product moves through, transport, assemble are also managed in this higher MES.

Yes, it will require a new thinking and alliance of small businesses but the value on agility and cost and the ability to scale provides a real opportunity for a new manufacturer and deliver model to take on the larger companies.  

To maintain a competitive edge, manufacturers must make a major shift in strategy to effectively synchronize activities among functionally and geographically dispersed groups. Those with whom they need to collaborate include:

• customers and, in some cases, their customer’s customers;

• distributors and channel partners;

• materials and sub-product suppliers;

• outsourced or contract manufacturers;

• logistics partners for distribution, warehousing, and transportation;

• providers of services such as legal and regulatory advice;

• multiple departments and divisions within their own company and with any of those entities described above.

A Collaborative Manufacturing strategy can help a company maximizes the effectiveness of its value chain in order to better control profits and address changing market demands.

Is this real, my answer is yes, I was on a plane last week, and two fellow travelers talked about the alliance and the seeking out others to make this ecosystem, combined with the agility of 3D printing, and then assemble these two expected to grow and had a good pipeline due to satisfy the “pay on delivery, with small order sizes” also the ability to have local final assembly close to distribution centers and significant retailers make them more desirable to occupy the “shelf space”. Both agree the reality is only now that the tracking and management are common across the plants in a hosted “managed service”.

Food for thought!