Like many industries, manufacturing is feeling the impact of a tumultuous few years. Tense geopolitical situations, dwindling resources, and the ever-looming threat of climate change all pose challenges that no company alone can overcome.
In order to rise above today’s challenges, manufacturers need to come together, pool their collective assets and insights, and create modern solutions to modern problems. But despite knowing this, manufacturers have typically failed to create such a system; regulatory requirements and intellectual property and data sovereignty concerns make data sharing an impossible goal.
That’s because they need to embrace data collaboration. By creating a collaborative data ecosystem that puts equal emphasis on security and accessibility, manufacturers can finally access the plethora of data assets sitting across their supply chain and discover previously hidden insights. Combined with the appropriate governance policies that enable trust and transparency, true data collaboration can help manufacturers thrive, not just survive, in an uncertain world.
All for one and one for all
With a collaborative data ecosystem in place, manufacturers at all stages of the supply chain can benefit from shared insights, combined assets, and, ultimately, the ability to achieve more innovation together than they ever could alone. Finally, through the alignment of data, technologies, and goals, manufacturers can overcome the challenges they currently face while seizing new and bolder opportunities.
Beyond unearthing collective insights through joining once-siloed data sets, manufacturers can also use their new collaborative environment to identify new revenue potential for their data assets and perform predictive maintenance across their manufacturing processes. But the most significant opportunity will be using data collaboration to accelerate the industry’s journey to net zero across their supply chain, including:
Cutting down on carbon-heavy activities and production, aiding in overall lower carbon emissions
Reducing waste through the supply chain, which will mean decreased costs and a lessened impact on the environment
Avoiding unnecessary costs and materials needed to address machine fixes through predictive maintenance
Improving reliability and transparency throughout the supply chain, resulting in better decision-making around waste, materials and costs
Incorporating smart manufacturing, through which data insights can be used to drive productivity, maximize efficiencies and curtail waste in the manufacturing process
Solving sustainability through data collaboration
Following the close of COP 27, the world’s sights are set firmly on sustainability. For manufacturing, an emission-heavy industry that has traditionally struggled to champion sustainability best practices, it’s never been more critical to get sustainability right.
Challenges around sustainability have typically arisen from trying to change or alter individual processes along well-oiled supply chains without the buy-in or support of other organizations along those chains. Conversely, the antidote must lie in a unified, collaboration-driven front from manufacturers.
True data collaboration can help organizations make quick and impactful changes to their supply chains as they inject efficiency and transparency into their processes, made possible by shared assets and understandings, and work together towards a shared green goal.
Apheris enables such collaboration. Our solution is already helping manufacturers across the globe collaborate on data, AI and share domain expertise – without ever risking the privacy or intellectual property of data, machine learning, or other assets.
“With Apheris, we found the perfect partner for exploring privacy-preserving analytics and optimization along the value chain with our customers.” - Christian Winkler, Director Global Infinergy Operations, BASF
