Introduction

In the Inescapable Data world, the ability to compress product manufacturing time, tease-out inefficiencies, and increase product personalization combine to create significant new values made possible by omnipresent wireless networks, data exchange, and, most importantly, a willingness to tear down business walls.

For the past few decades, manufacturers have taken an incremental and inwardly focused approach to improving efficiency. Upgrading a machine with an engine that has slightly more horsepower yielding 10 percent more units per day, higher plant utilization, or fewer operations to performsuch upgrades represent incremental and inwardly focused changes. Manufacturers are now beginning to see that if they want to effect radical improvements in efficiency, they must look outside the walls of the factory. They must also develop a willingness to allow very deep and direct relationships with suppliers, distributors, customers, and even competitors (called coopetition). The value chain as it is now called, forms the linkages that tie together manufacturers with suppliers, distribution channels, retailers, and finally, consumers.

Serious gains in efficiency can come from making value-chain linkages high speed and transparent. To do so, manufacturers must be willing to break through the comfort barriers that have existed for decades. In short, the value chain, from raw materials supplier all the way through to the customer, has to operate like a single, well-oiled machinea machine that needs a minimum of human intervention and exhibits near-zero latency. Such process optimizations are possible and can yield up to an 80 percent end-to-end efficiency improvement. What makes this possible is the ability to harvest a wealth of data from many different but interconnected sources all along the value chain, and then analyze and exploit the data in real or near-real time.