Experience gained by leaders in business digital transformation has proven that production digitization makes for enterprises’ greater competitive advantages in the long run and drastically accelerates all business processes. Successful development of the digital transformation strategy requires comprehensive efforts to modernize company infrastructure at all production stages starting from components warehouse, say experts at SKF, a major international manufacturer of bearings, industrial seals and lubrication systems that also offers technologies and solutions aimed to boost equipment productivity and efficiency.
The traditional scheme of components warehouses’ work at manufacturing facilities, with storekeepers issuing items, is long obsolete. Digital transformation of the warehouse’s work is today’s proper solution to meet manufacturers’ demands.
“Together with Applied Mechanics, a company engaged in providing comprehensive services to industrial facilities, we managed to implement a large-scale project to automate and digitalize the components storage and delivery system at the consignment storage facility of Severstal’s Cherepovets Steel Mill,” said Alexei Shulepov, general director of SKF Russia & CIS.
The automated storage and delivery system is a follow-up to the consignment storage development project; the use of high-tech software allows for streamlining supply chain management. In the digital era and due to the changing market trends business relations between the supplier and customer reach a new level, where the changing of approaches to supply chain management plays a key role.
SKF and Applied Mechanics developed a solution that calculates monthly demand for the most popular kinds of bearings. The automated storage system allowed for making the operations of the storage continuous. An important indicator of the efficiency of such solutions is the simplification and alignment of used product registration. Every day, the storage facility manager receives a report on the movement of components and thus can analyze the demand and plan new purchases.
Digital transformation provides both supplier and customer with the opportunity to find their own drivers of business growth and development. The project of SKF and Applied Mechanics allows for integrating the consignment storage into the enterprise’s united system and provides a huge synergetic effect in order to increase the efficiency of production and business development. The enterprise receives both a product and a customized digital solution. According to McKinsey experts, digital transformation in metallurgy has a potential benefit of $115 bln, and such projects will definitely be part of the digital standards of industrial facility automation.