Manufacturing and Engineering
Manufacturing and engineering: digitalisation in the furtherance of your competitiveness and differentiation

Globalisation, the extended enterprise, increasingly complex products… to stay competitive, manufacturers have to perpetually optimise their practices and improve their agility to adapt to changes in their sector and demand for their goods.

Innovation and differentiation factors are far from being limited to one stage in the product life cycle or to one service. You need to capitalise on data from your suppliers to improve product traceability and knowledge. The customer experience, meanwhile, is based on the ability to quickly respond to requests and provide additional services. Without overlooking globalisation and integration within your ecosystem, which require the transcoding of data to be managed. And manufactured goods are becoming more complex, which demands better control over product master data.

Faced with these challenges, the vast range of different applications and technologies used in industrial information systems is a major hurdle to overcome, with bespoke software developments, legacy applications, systems that are not readily upgradeable, etc.

Your information system needs to be transformed so that it is no longer a constraint and source of inertia, but instead the foundation underpinning your greater agility and supporting your development.

01THE PITFALLS

The challenges posed by changes
in manufacturing and its digitalisation

You need to be agile and to ensure continuity of information from suppliers, through the manufacturer, and on to end customers.

To meet these requirements, the key is re-engineering your information system, by considering the whole picture to manage a company-wide view of manufacturing and business processes.

La transformation de l’écosystème industriel et de l’entreprise étendue

Integrating within your manufacturing ecosystem

You need to make your in-house applications communicate with each other, while avoiding point-to-point interfaces. You also need to connect with other stakeholders in your value chain, to leverage their data and limit the risks of re-entering information and introducing errors.

This is the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) aspect !

Les process industriels doivent se numériser

Managing your business processes

Processes must not restrict themselves to particular applications, but be positioned in terms of the business requirement to organise data traffic and structure interactions.

You consequently need to model processes from a business point of view, and deploy them quickly.

This is the BPM (Business Process Management) aspect  !

La digitalisation des référentiels industriels

Standardising master data repository management

The more complex products become, the more their value depends on consolidation of the information and documentation describing them, together with the ability to provide them in a structured and usable way to end customers.
Apart from products themselves, there might be a number of master data repositories to be managed (suppliers, etc.).

This is the MDM (Master Data Management) aspect !

l’Industrie 4.0 passe par les services et la digitalisation

Offering added-value services

The services associated with your products are a real driver of differentiation.

Providing a customer extranet, warning of upcoming promotional campaigns, or providing a real-time picture of stock levels are just some such benefits.

Openness of this sort could also help partners anticipate your requirements.

This is the API Management aspect !

02METHODS AND SOLUTIONS

What methods and solutions deliver the best response for digital transformation in manufacturing ?

During structurally significant projects such as ERP, PLM or CRM migrations, manufacturers’ IT departments often come to realise that such projects in themselves are not enough to resolve their interfacing and data traffic management issues for the business as a whole. As well as these projects, the real route to greater agility is to de-silo the information system, to set up a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and to begin the re-engineering of business processes.

It is consequently an opportunity to look at problems from the business perspective, and to build functional processes jointly through business and IT departments working together.

This of course requires a solution to be available that leaves IT and application constraints behind to deliver interoperability between data and processes.

Ask yourself one key question: do your business departments have the feeling that your information system hinders them or enables them, operationally ?

03 THE BLUEWAY SOLUTION

The Blueway solution to support digital transformation in manufacturing

Blueway has been helping manufacturers with their digital transformation, IT systems re-engineering and development of their processes for the last 15 years. While we are software publishers, our main goal is to propose pragmatic responses to your operational and strategic requirements:

Support increased globalisation and improve your ability to integrate within a much larger ecosystem (a group structure, more partners, etc.);
Supervise the status of all data traffic and trigger immediate notification of any failure;
Improve the upgradeability of your information systems and facilitate the implementation of new applications;
Improve customer satisfaction and complaints handling, and offer added-value services.

Our customers in manufacturing include :

In response to the agility and product information management challenges you face, Blueway provides an upgradeable solution designed for the manufacturing sector. This platform incorporates the various dimensions of data interchange including the application bus, process modelling and management, a master data repository and API Management. It consequently provides a 360° view and supports cross-functional processes.

As a low-code and full-web platform, it is quickly implemented and IT and business teams soon become familiar with its main features. The alignment of people and processes benefits your entire business and your customers.

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