Achieving operational excellence with real-time plant floor visibility

IDC White Paper: Sponsored by Zebra Technologies Corporation

IN THIS WHITE PAPER

This IDC Manufacturing Insights' White Paper discusses the results of our most recent research analyzing the trends of manufacturing operations management. We conducted a survey of over 240 European manufacturing enterprises across multiple sectors including consumer packaged goods (CPG), high-tech/electronics, discrete manufacturing, and process manufacturing.

Among the key findings presented in this White Paper we highlight the following:

• Fostering operational excellence is back at the top of manufacturers' agendas. This shows a profound mindset change and rethinking of some of manufacturers' recent priorities, which over the last 10–15 years, were essentially focused on production outsourcing to low cost countries.

• European manufacturers believe that the most compelling approach to achieving operational excellence is through gaining higher levels of plant floor visibility.

• One of the key results of this study is that about 65% of European manufacturers believe that the importance of plant floor visibility will increase over the next three years and they are ready to launch initiatives to achieve that.

• Survey results confirm that information technology (IT) and operation technology (OT) have a fundamental role to play in supporting companies achieving operational excellence in manufacturing through a higher level of plant floor visibility.

This White Paper can support manufacturers to define their plant floor visibility strategy by providing:

• A definition of what plant floor visibility is, along with attributes that define business benefits and technology support.

• A maturity framework that identifies five incremental steps to achieving an advanced level of plant floor visibility.

• A benchmark of where European manufacturers are today along the maturity framework and where will they be three years from now.

• A description of the technologies most invested in to support plant floor visibility, including 2D barcodes, intelligent automation/robotics, Internet of things and RFID.

• A series of recommendations that will guide manufacturers towards increased plant floor visibility

View the video from IDC analyst Pierfrancesco Manenti and download the White paper from the Zebra/IDC iView site at: http://zebra.idciview.net/