I've recently joined a company that do manufacturing, involving supply chain, shop floor management, material handling, inventory, production planning, quality control, tracability etc.
I'm trying to learn as much as possible around today's innovation in these areas, what are the best technologies, best processes, what companies are in the forefront, which are up and coming, but find it a lot more difficult than for pure online software solutions.
What approaches would you take to this, and is there any sources of information that you can recommend? Ways of extracting this knowledge?
Obviously ChatGPT, perplexity and others have been asked.
But first, why? What's your position at this company? It seems like you're trying to improve something, but perhaps first spend six months at the company and understand how and why they work before looking at areas to improve?
I haven't had that experience at all, and my long software career has intentionally involved working in many different industries.
In my experience, most meaningful domain knowledge comes from peers, books, classes, trade journals, trade shows, etc
Online resources are almost always feeble and superficial in comparison because most domains don't have a tradition of self-educated people just rolling in and trying to slap stuff together the way software does.
It sounds like you want to take this new opportunity seriously, and I encourage you to try doing that away from your desk and browser. Instead, immerse yourself in whatever you can of those more substantial, real-world sources of knowledge -- most especially by engaging directly with your new peers and colleagues.
In manufacturing, eliminating waste/process improvements are always being looked at and often encouraged. The vast majority of manufacturing efforts require bespoke solutions (material handling, planning, quality, etc.), that's most likely why it's hard to find "common solutions". Many get tied into common systems, but it's often a "we made it work" condition and not seamless. So walk the floor, observe what's bespoke, observe what could be common and integrated, then explore those items.
ERP software seems to be the largest contributor in this space. I would look at modern solutions as much as you can. Many companies are entrenched in SAP and Epicor (QAD, Netsuite, etc.) which try to do everything and often don't do anything really well. Start there, but there may be more obvious areas to look at in your observation. Good luck!
Someone at your company probably knows the best conferences for your particular niche. Also, talk to the sales people in your company because they spend most of their workday talking to people in manufacturing.
Here's an example of an industry conference (3D printing / additive manufacturing): https://www.rapid3devent.com/
You're right, it is much more difficult to self-research, since most of the information is locked away behind proprietary systems. 99% of people in this industry learn what their company does and their niche, but thats it. The fact that you are actually motivated enough to learn about your work outside your job means you're more motivated than almost all of your coworkers (unless you work at aforementioned rare company).
For general research I would say look at the websites of your company and its competitors on their promotional materials. This will tell you what they're excited about and what they want their customers to be excited about.
If you want to succeed at your company in particular, quite simply learn how your company does things from any internal docs or processes. There are lots of acronyms so learning those and building a glossary will help a lot. Building your own wiki (I use Obsidian and its great) as you go is also helpful, but that would apply to any knowledge job.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Goal-Audiobook/B00IFG88SM
If you are a big enough place to have them talk to your production planners, your buyers, your manufacturing engineers. They are probably going to think of you as an adversary at first wanting to 'fix things' which means 'breaking their processes' and 'putting things in the way of doing their jobs'. Lower level people will be afraid you are going to automate them out of a job. You can't been seen as just working for the carpet (people in the offices), but also for the concrete (people on the floor).
As others have pointed out, this is, as far as I've seen in the last decade, a very conservative industry in terms of taking risks and trying new things. Some companies build an excessive amount of infrastructure for these operations internally, some go entirely with legacy off-the-shelf stuff (think SAP, NetSuite/Oracle, etc), and some go with a blend of the above. I've seen little traction with modern software, but this is likely a byproduct of my only having seen some small number of companies' operations.
There are a number of companies trying to innovate in the space in a variety of ways, but here are some modern manufacturing ERP companies: - https://fulcrumpro.com/ - https://tulip.co/ - https://oden.io/ - https://www.machinemetrics.com/
In theoretical terms, we are approaching the third revolution:
- the first was the factory, meaning series production
- the second was CNC, or subtractive manufacturing with generic machines able to produce generic parts
- the current, still in pioneering phase is additive manufacturing, aka 3D printing
Aside many new experiments. But that's a niche, the real world is mostly simply obsolete tech, badly kept up with strange and undocumented hacks. The part you describe (IM, PLM, ...) are not really manufacturing, just common tools from pure IT migrated elsewhere, in software we have SCMs, CI, CD, ..., in manufacturing they are named PLMs but they are just different software doing the same things. Since "programming languages" used in mechanical industry instead of languages with a VM or a compiler or an interpreter are CAD/CAE/CAM suite their SCM/PLM tend to be one of the three giant suite, Catia (Dassault/IBM), Creo (former Pro-Engineer) and NX (Siemens or someone else, I do not know actual situation, in the past was Unigraphics). Other industries are still on 2D solutions. Rarely some industries use different "less omnicomprehensive" suites. You can learn something from some published courses but most training material is on sale, not freely available, because well... Anything is a product in industryland...
Anyway at this level Catia and surrounding are definitively the most feature rich and advanced, NX is and Creo are far more limited, they have a bit of PLM and simulation but they are not meant to be "an anything tool", Dassault try even to allow modeling the Earth in their suite. Beside that any company have choose a genital lace to one of the relevant "software partner" and essentially they are tied to it like on the business side they are tied to an ERP.
One of the best resources to learn about manufacturing optimization aka the Theory of Constraints is a novel called “The Goal” by Elyahu Goldratt [1]
1) Make friends with the technicians on the floor 2) Find ways to either shadow, observe, or actually learn to do what they do 3) Walk around the shop floor and watch (safely) and ask questions (safely)
MFR has a lot of nuance and you you won’t get a good grasp for the intuition behind being good at this until you encounter the problems and corner cases in person.
As for innovation: unless you have joined an “innovative” company, innovation will be hard to find. Iterating through manufacturing method is expensive, and each of the major methods (CNC Machining, Additive Printing, Metal Forming, Welding, and Automation) is an entire career’s worth of skill and knowledge on their own. Some of them are old and have been innovated already. Some face physical limitations in material science. Some have maxed out what’s possible under our laws of physics.
The leading edge right now centers around robotics and additive printing (especially metal printing). Try to get involved there.
Supply chain is almost purely an experience gain. You have to develop the muscle and intuition to navigate complex supply chain problems when they arise.
It’s a big field! Lots of unsolved problems. Good luck!
If you have to ask this question, than your survival as a company should avoid naively competing with established contract manufacturers. Startup probability of success is 1:22, and ratio of product to service company survival rate is 1:6. That means even if you are an expert and do everything right, the chances of survival of half a business cycle is 1:132... The investors are already acutely aware of these numbers if they are competent.
Best regards =)
> Ways of extracting this knowledge?
Ask questions. Ask obvious questions. Walk the plant floor.
Be prepared for things to not make sense. The only real explanation is a long history of "They made it work"
Your machines are named Machine B, Machine A, and Machine C because A and B went in first, C was added later and there was only room on that side.
The problem is not there was no plan - the problem is there was a plan in 196x, and another plan in 197x, and .... (See "Standards" https://xkcd.com/927/ )
Learn about Lean Manufacturing and Toyota production system obviously.
Traceability - do you know what your bill of trace is? Do you really know? Can you prove that it will never be wrong? Do you audit your trace process? Do you audit your trace captures? All of them? (I worked on traceability for a few years. I will never work on a compliance app again)
Innovation in the areas you mentioned will always be about balancing constraints. The answer to "Why don't they just do X" is: try it and see. It will always work in your mind. You don't know what constraint is the hardest until you actually build it, whatever it is. The hard constraint will move around depending on exactly what you are doing - it's not consistent between companies or between lines of business or even between stages in the process.
Physical automation in manufacturing is more difficult than it seems at first, second, and third thought. Automation does not solve problems. You must solve every problem the automation will encounter.
Authors: Sidney Dekker, Clayton Christensen, W E Deming - not all about manufacturing specifically, but a very good basis for thinking about people and business.
These aren't technical documents but they do provide relevant background to understand the landscape and might shed light as to why there is little "innovation".
Quality control and traceability is likely more customized software because challenges are more unique to the product and the industry you are in.
I am not sure what you goal is. Are you a software engineer entering the manufacturing space or what's the goal?
I was not able to find a knowledge path that I could follow, is there a degree out there that lists its textbooks?
Those things will have a bearing on what you should do to achieve your goals.
Skim some of the source code of an open source ERP package like Odoo, depth first, breadth first, or a combination of both, module by module. And here, by modules, I mean ERP modules, like sales, purchase, inventory, etc., not Python modules, although Odoo is written in Python, so it has Python modules too, in the source code.
Due to Python, the code is relatively high level, so somewhat easy to read.
Of course you need to have a reading level knowledge of Python, but, you know, 'executable pseudocode'. ;)
Odoo is supposed to be popular and to have a good number of vendors and other things in its ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I have only read these points, not verified them for myself.
(But I do have some background in the manufacturing software domain, and in Python, both, hands on, for non-trivial periods.)
This is what I would do if I had your goal, apart from things that others have suggested, such as reading books about manufacturing and ERP.
Be warned: manufacturing is a huge domain.
We have a lot of free info material on the topic of IT and Industrial Automation including Shopfloor KPIs like OEE. And the project behind it, is even open source.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO