This Month in SMT007 Magazine

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Smart Factories: Readers Share Their Progress and Priorities

We recently surveyed readers on the topic of smart factories, specifically exploring reader perceptions of what a smart factory entails, along with implementation plans that may be on readers’ minds. This survey offers an informal sampling of those responses.

Our survey did not require any of the questions to be answered, so not every respondent answered every question. However, what emerged shed some interesting light on what readers are thinking with respect to Industry 4.0 and the smart factory.

Question: Of the following objectives, which are your top three key motivators (i.e., process challenges that you want to solve) when it comes to implementing a smart factory?

Looking at how respondents ranked their top three from this list of 10 objectives, some patterns do emerge. The three objectives most listed as a top priority were increased throughput, higher yields, and higher profit margins. This suggests that the ability to support more sales revenue is top-of-mind. In the second-priority category, the top three concerns were reduced labor cost, less waste, and expanded capabilities (with lower operating costs close behind). Respondents are looking to control expenses next.

The leading response in the third slot was scalability, while all the other responses started to flatten out. Scalability is a slightly different kind of objective than revenue growth or cost containment.

Overall, these objectives suggest good basic business management priorities: grow revenue, reduce operating costs, and invest in expansion.

To view the rest of these survey results, which appeared in the March 2020 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.

Be sure to download the PDF of this magazine to your library for a handy future reference.