Photo: Patrick Hendry
Manufacturing is getting faster. Companies are investing in new facilities, expanding production and looking for ways to increase output. Engineering teams can modify designs, production teams can change processes, and factories can move more units through increasingly sophisticated equipment.
But there is another system that has to keep pace with all of it: information.
An engineering change doesn’t become real on the factory floor simply because it has been approved. A new specification doesn’t improve production until the worker using it has the correct information. A revised process doesn’t exist operationally until the person performing the work is executing the revised process.
That creates an overlooked constraint for manufacturers trying to move faster. The physical production system may be capable of increasing speed while the information system surrounding it struggles to keep up.
The Last Mile of Manufacturing Information
Manufacturing organizations already have systems for managing engineering data, approving changes, and documenting processes.
The challenge is what happens between those systems and the workstation.
An engineering team can make a change upstream, but that change still has to travel through documentation and production workflows before it reaches the person building the product. Each step creates an opportunity for delay, duplication or interpretation.
The result is a strange possibility: a manufacturer can have the correct information somewhere inside the organization while the person who needs it is still working from something else.
Garth Coleman, CEO of Canvas Envision, sees that final connection as increasingly important as manufacturers accelerate production.
“If the change is not on the screen in front of the worker, the floor is building to whatever was printed last,” Coleman said.
The problem isn’t necessarily that the engineering organization failed to make the change. It is that the change didn’t complete the journey from engineering decision to physical execution.
When Approved Doesn’t Mean Executed
Manufacturing has become increasingly digital upstream. Engineers work with sophisticated 3D models, product lifecycle systems and digital design tools.
Yet the final step can still depend on static documents, printed drawings, or instructions assembled separately from the engineering source.
That creates a gap between what the organization knows and what the production floor can see.
A worker shouldn’t have to reconstruct the current state of a product by comparing a drawing with a written procedure and the physical component in front of them. Every additional interpretation creates another opportunity for the information and the action to diverge.
The problem becomes more consequential when engineering changes happen frequently.
A design modification may affect the orientation of a component, the sequence of an assembly or the requirements for inspection. If those changes take too long to reach the workstation, the factory can continue producing while operating against an earlier version of the product.
At that point, speed becomes a liability. Producing more units per hour doesn’t help if some of those units are being produced according to outdated information.
Turning Engineering Data Into Execution
A visual layer can reduce some of the distance between engineering and the factory floor.
Rather than recreating information for production separately from the engineering source, model-based instructions can use the product’s actual geometry to communicate the work.
Workers can interact with the model, rotate an assembly, isolate a component and see the current step in the context of the physical task.
That matters because manufacturing instructions are ultimately trying to answer a physical question: What do I do here, right now?
A visual instruction can answer that question closer to the point where the work occurs.
Canvas Envision’s approach connects model-based work instructions to engineering data while allowing manufacturers to build interactive workflows around them. The instruction can incorporate text, images, video, tables and other elements, while the workflow can capture information from the worker as the job is performed.
The objective is not simply to make documentation more attractive. It is to reduce the distance between the information engineers create and the action workers take.
The Real Test of a Digital Manufacturing System
Digital transformation is often evaluated by the systems a company has purchased or the number of processes it has moved away from paper.
A more useful test may be how quickly a change can travel.
- If engineering approves a change today, when does the person on the production floor see it?
- If quality identifies a recurring problem, how quickly can that information influence the instruction?
- If an operator discovers that a documented process doesn’t match reality, how does that observation make its way back into the system?
These are questions about organizational latency. And they become more important as manufacturing accelerates. A slow information loop is easier to tolerate when production is slow and changes are infrequent. It becomes much harder to tolerate when facilities are expected to increase output rapidly and engineering teams are continually modifying products and processes.
Synchronizing the Factory
The next phase of manufacturing’s digital transformation may therefore be less about adding another isolated system and more about connecting the systems that already exist.
Engineering needs to know what is happening in production. Production needs access to current engineering information. Quality needs the data generated during execution. And workers need information that reflects what the organization expects them to build today, not what someone printed weeks ago.
That synchronization can become a competitive advantage. The fastest factory isn’t necessarily the one with the fastest machine. It may be the one that can move a decision from an engineer’s screen to a worker’s hands with the least delay.
As American manufacturers expand production, the pressure to close that gap will only increase. Because ultimately, a production line can only move as fast as the information required to run it.