A few weeks back I wrote about the flood of press and equipment press releases that came out ahead of Printing United claiming an Industry 4.0 or automation capability – reflecting the ongoing labor pressures (either cost or availability) in print and on-demand manufacturing.
It’s great that the focus is evolving from pure equipment features to automation, but a lot of these press releases speak as if automation is “the” outcome.
Our perspective is that it is not, and a broader perspective is required.
Automation is a method, a mechanism – one way of achieving a more efficient outcome. Put another way – automation is ‘how’ you do something, it is not the goal in itself.
The end point is “Efficiency” which is a lot broader in scope. The importance of this distinction is that when implementing an automation project, contextual questions that focus on efficiency need to be asked such as:
- How seamlessly does each process stage transition to the next?
- By adding this new automation stage how does that affect the flow in the plant?
- Is each process stage at peak productivity?
Automation is not a panacea, and without the broader focus on efficiency then critical process improvement opportunities will be missed. For example, sometimes big efficiency gains might be realized by:
- Introducing a business rule based, work due date color logic on batch or job sheets; or
- Refining finishing team instructions on a job sheet; or
- Changing fail rules or limits
- Tuning the target cycle rate on a machine to get better flow in the plant (rather than having work back up at a downstream work stage)
These are all examples of information or rule changes that sit as levers that can be pulled to increase efficiency beyond merely automating a function.
That’s the power of focusing on efficiency. At the heart of efficiency lies a focus on outcomes – it’s about the rate of flow of work through a factory with least inputs to create the profit maximizing outcome.So the key takeaway is that there is an important difference between automation and outcome. This means that when that next bit of automation kit arrives, it is critical that the implementation project includes resources allocated to the whole efficiency picture and not merely automating a task.
