UCLA

The productivity, precision, and performance benefits of Smart Manufacturing are unleashed when there is frictionless movement of information-data in context, at the right time, among systems, operations and people, that can create value within and across all manufacturers and all sizes of plants throughout enterprise supply chains. This chapter argues that the line of sight to the full economic potential of Smart Manufacturing requires business, leadership, market, and infrastructure realignments for the “democratization” of “smart” business, technology, operational, and workforce data practices industry-wide. It argues that access and the ability to effectively use operational data in cyber operations and the knowhow to deploy Smart Manufacturing solutions are increasingly important but are more and more constrained by today’s manufacturing infrastructure practices. It describes how CESMII, the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (https://www.cesmii.org), has been addressing this democratization, breaking through barriers, and transforming manufacturing to a new data-centric orientation.