Digital Transformation for Heavy Industry Manufacturers

We’ve previously covered how light manufacturers can benefit from investing in digital transformation; heavy industry manufacturers can see similar payoff by implementing digital technologies.

The unique niche that is heavy industry offers different digital opportunities for manufacturers looking to modernize operations. These following strategies are more attuned to your exact needs and capabilities as a heavy manufacturer.

What Is Heavy Industry?

First off, let’s quickly define what kinds of manufacturers are included when we talk about heavy industry.

Heavy industry manufacturers are typically characterized by their large size – huge operating costs, large factory operations including excavation or natural resources, and big machinery and equipment.

Typical industries of heavy manufacturing include chemical and natural resource processing, energy and electric plants, automotive, aircraft and aerospace, artillery, and defense.

A light industry manufacturer would produce items for consumers, like microchips for example. In contrast, a heavy industry manufacturer could be a coal refinery or a pulp and paper mill. In this last example, the products made are still used by individual consumers, but are usually accessed via a middleman such as a regional or national government.

Heavy industry is necessary to sustain modern infrastructure like electricity, for example. It also is a huge supplier of materials and components to light manufacturing partners.

Difference in Automation Capability Between Light & Heavy Industry

Heavy manufacturing comes with additional challenges to production. Because of the amount of mechanical and chemical processing involved, factories tend to expel large amounts of pollution. Because of this, many heavy industry plants are held to strict zoning specifications to limit harm to surrounding ecosystems.

Also, as we mentioned before, heavy manufacturers produce elements that are necessary components for many other light manufacturing processes. Because of this, heavy industry fluctuations have a large impact on the economic state and adjacent industries.

The effects of these qualities are profound: heavy industry is slower to change processes or adapt to industrial trends and is reluctant to try new technologies. Any insufficiently planned changes to process or production has a massive impact on the economic situation as a whole.

Whereas light manufacturers could more easily implement automation and IoT devices in a single factory, heavy manufacturers have to consider longevity, hardiness, integration, and many other possibilities.

Now, that’s not to say that automation is fruitless – automation just needs to be strategic because there’s less room for error.

Unique Challenges of Heavy Industry

A good way to finesse your strategy for digital transformation is to be aware of your unique weak points as a heavy manufacturer.

The Foundry Industry’s paper “Navigating Heavy Industry Digital Transformation” suggests there are 3 main challenges heavy manufacturers face:

1. Operational Challenges: equipment integration and updating out-of-date machinery, infrastructure, and systems

2. Poor Planning: lack of long-term views, inadequate growth strategies and alignment of objectives

3. Organizational Culture Challenges: lack of digital competencies, organizational change, fear of job loss, lack of managerial skills, poor agile structures due to lack of commitment and communication from leadership

Now, when considering potential digital technologies to implement, make sure that you cover each of these 3 areas: operational, planning, and organizational.

For example, before introducing basic machine automation, be aware of current and future integration requirements, set up a detailed roadmap and timeline, and invest in the complementary skills required for its upkeep while clearly communicating progress along the way.

Digital Transformation & Smart Factories in Heavy Industry

Keeping those previous challenges in mind, here are some areas of specific digital improvements that can align your company with the progression of Industry 5.0.

Look For Digital Improvements In Diverse Areas

A win is a win is a win.

In other words, you may not see improvements from digital transformation in the exact same areas as you implement technologies, and that’s ok.

According to McKinsey, "Digital improvements may not have a direct impact on the outputs of a particular business unit but along the value chain or due to synergies creating greater value. Silos are more pronounced and harder to break down in resource-heavy industries, as they usually originate further back in time when rigid departmental structures were a movement that improved manufacturing companies’ productivity."

Light manufacturers might implement an MES and see a direct result that is decreased time to assemble each product, for example. Heavy manufacturers, in contrast, are slower to see direct changes. Setting up an ERP may have smaller improvements in other areas besides assembly times, such as integrating supply-chain insights with production planning due to automated predictive data sets, for example.

It’s simple, but it’s popular for a reason: replacing miscellaneous excel spreadsheets with a cohesive ERP is a huge step toward becoming more digitally efficient.

Form Cohesive Strategies Aligned With Good Management

It’s not as flashy as robotics, but a key part of any digital transformation strategy is establishing clear processes for technology selection and implementation.

According to McKinsey, "Resource-heavy industries need to show value through digitization across multiple assets and domains in parallel to create organization-wide support. To do this, a significant number of high-impact use cases needs to run in parallel, with failure of some of those use cases factored in."

Change management processes should be established and initiatives should be clearly prioritized, including being updated regularly according to real time changes.

Teams – from shop floor to management and everyone in-between – should have a good mix of skills and experience so that individuals can draw on each other’s insight and knowledge bases.

Choose Technologies That Work Instead of Following Every Trend

You don’t need to have IoT devices if they don’t serve your operational needs.

There are tons of well-suited innovations that are still going to help you digitally transform. For example, heavy manufacturers could make use of cobots or advanced robotics only for jobs that are increasingly dangerous for humans due to temperature, climate, or radiation.

Clean energy plant infrastructure is a less-flashy but incredibly important technology to implement, with tons of cost benefits. It’s also possible to explore applying augmented or virtual reality to test resource-draining process improvement suggestions before they actually are tried out in real-time.

Invest In Your Workforce’s Abilities

Finally, you must invest in the skillsets of your employees to ensure your digital process improvements will stick in the long run.

Especially for heavy manufacturers, workers with years of experience are few and far between. Digital transformation will never completely change every aspect of your production process, it will merely enhance it. Therefore, you have to set up ways to bring less technical workers into the digital era while capturing valuable tribal knowledge.

Invest in upskilling your workers and diversifying your teams by using a work instruction platform or MES that has advanced analytics for improving process performance alongside digital work management tools.

Then you’ll have the best of both worlds: data transparency to monitor process improvements, and long-term strategic planning for capturing critical insight on the job.