Manufacturing success story shared in recent publication
Published: Mar 7, 2023 3:15 PM
By Carla Nelson
The Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Manufacturing Systems (ICAMS) at Auburn University focuses on helping small and medium-sized manufacturers transform their operations by introducing digital capabilities. To build the business case for digitalization, Laser Precision, a small to medium-sized manufacturer (SMM), recently shared its story with ICAMS. Laser Precision’s success story has recently been published in Manufacturing Engineering, a magazine published by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.
The ICAMS team worked with the company to identify the key elements of their system that made it successful, generalized the concepts to make them applicable to a generic SMM, then built a business case to motivate and help justify digitization at SMMs, which aligns with ICAMS’ mission of bringing Smart Manufacturing to SMMs.
Ashley Yarbrough, a recent industrial and systems engineering doctoral graduate who authored the story on Laser Precision along with assistant industrial and systems engineering professor Daniel Silva, said the company was featured as a success story because it is a pioneer amongst other SMMs with a focus on building an information-centric business model that can handle volatile orders with ease.
“Laser Precision has worked closely with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider to successfully address their needs and digitalize almost all aspects of their business processes from procurement to fulfillment,” Yarbrough said. “It was an honor to write about their great success with digitalization.”
The article shared that to be competitive in today’s dynamic manufacturing environment, SMMs need to implement mechanisms to facilitate the effective processing of multiple streams of highly volatile and time-sensitive customer requirements. This allows SMMs to provide truly agile performance and to leverage previously opaque data to promote efficiency and economies of scale.
“It is made possible by implementing digital tools, processes, and systems powered by data science and advanced algorithms, ensuring data is quickly and accurately received, interpreted and deployed with minimal human intervention,” the article stated.
The article also pointed out hurdles that SMMs face, which are underscored in the recent ICAMS Smart Manufacturing Adoption Study. The article focuses on some of these hurdles and how Laser Precision has worked to overcome them.
“Laser Precision has a story to tell on how they envisioned the future of the metal fabrication industry and transformed to meet those predictions,” Yarbrough said. “Other SMMs can learn from how Laser Precision improved their data visualization techniques and adapted to near-real-time supply, demand and production data.”
See the full article here.
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Assistant Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Daniel Silva, along with recent doctoral graduate Ashley Yarbrough, recently shared Laser Precision's manufacturing success story in a journal publication.
