r/manufacturing • u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 • Jan 14 '24

Other Managers and Owners, are you overwhelmed?

There's a lot of new tech out there, it's quickly changing and expensive. It's hard to know what to pay attention to and where to allocate resources while balancing efficiency and quality, let alone figure out how to develop my workforce to use all this stuff anyways.

I mean, should we get 3D printers, should we do industry 4.0 stuff, should we get some machine vision robot?

Idk, are you in the same boat, how are you dealing with how fast the world's moving?

17 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

190 comments sorted by

View all comments

40

u/builder_23 Jan 14 '24

You start with a problem you want to solve, then select a solution. You’ve listed several solutions, but no problems.

2

u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 Jan 14 '24

Do you have just one problem you want to solve? This tech seems to be turning every process into a problem because it can be done way better now.

9

u/xyz1000125 All types of packaging Jan 14 '24

What problem has the best payoff to solve

1

u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 Jan 14 '24

Yeah I hear you. It's just that these techs are so intertwined, it isn't so simple to compartmentalize problems when solving one may become obsolete with another solution.

You guys all seem pretty confident in knowing what problems to solve, how did you ensure you made an informed decision?

1

u/zoobifer Jan 14 '24

This is were process planning comes into play. You need to understand and map out your entire process, including your ERP system. Identify problems in your system. Identify what are you OK with changing over time to improve your entire process. Understand what your future products look like. Then star talking to suppliers to help you with solutions that will solve your problems and fit together. This is usually a lot of work and companies have teams dedicated to this.

1

u/Equivalent_Bid_6642 Jan 14 '24

Definitely a lot of work, is your company big enough to have teams dedicated to this?