Automation initiatives to succeed in the new normal

4. A culture of continuous improvement
Automation is at the center of everything we need to do in a world where social distancing and remote working are the new normal. We want to accelerate the pace of our digital transformation and have been investing in remote expertise. We are exploring quick-win Mine Digitization solutions to build more resilience and visibility into our supply chain. This is enabled by large scale connected equipment, which is the path to site benchmarking and predictive maintenance, improving at scale the Mean Time Between Failure of our critical lines, and thus improving our service levels and performance.

5. Enhancing visibility into our operations
During the recovery phase, it has been critical to improve visibility into our operations. We have built manufacturing data dashboards that bring information directly from the shop floor, facilitating operational decision-making on resource allocation and prioritization. We are also deploying automated analytics, powered by machine learning, that will help us to identify the areas we should examine more closely.

6. Accelerating the pace of our digital transformation
Implementing new, automated technologies in our supply chain operations is important to help us face future disruptions and lockdowns with minimum impact. Here, too, EcoStruxure Machine Advisor has been key. It enables machine builders to provide new services to machine operators for each installed machine at any production site anywhere in the world. The way we are using this solution in our Smart Factories in Asia is to benchmark the performance of our machines in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and India. It allows us to see where we are operating most efficiently and replicate the conditions across the network – thus accelerating our digitization efforts.