Ever since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the auto industry has been left trying to navigate a wide range of challenges, including labor shortages, plant shutdowns, transportation disruptions, and shortages of critical components like semiconductor microchips. The chip shortage alone has resulted in fewer new cars in the market, long delays on the existing models that do reach consumers and dealerships, and cars being shipped out with fewer features to reduce the number of non-essential chips needed – in addition to billions of dollars in economic losses.
With the effects of these challenges expected to last into 2023 and beyond, a top question among many manufacturers in the auto industry is how they can bring agility and resilience to their supply chain. They need solutions that go beyond simply stockpiling components. They need responsive, next-generation solutions that will help them better anticipate supply chain disruptions, adapt to evolving consumer behaviors, and create better outcomes for both the consumer and the company. Cognitive manufacturing can be a powerful framework to help automotive manufacturers reach all of those goals.
Benefits of Cognitive Manufacturing
Increased Uptime and Efficiency
From optimizing operations and manufacturing processes to equipment maintenance, cognitive manufacturing helps manufacturers make the most of all of the resources available to them. These solutions – which are a combination of new-age solutions like Digital Twins, Control Towers, AR/VR, Computer Vision, Advanced Analytics, and AI/ML with NLP – can be used to help optimize floorplans and production scheduling, as well as anticipate necessary equipment maintenance before failure occurs. Additionally, solutions like Digital Twins can help in building scenarios to plan for the alternatives in case of disruptions.
Improved Product Quality and Maintenance
Safety recalls are a far too common problem for auto manufacturers. Not only are they costly for the manufacturer and inconvenient for the consumer, in the worst case scenario, they can cause long-term damage to a company’s reputation with the public. AI-enabled cognitive technologies can help prevent these types of problems through simulations and collecting data from sources like test results, field maintenance records and real-time data from connected vehicles. This information can be used to anticipate things like product failure, maintenance schedules and product performance in various conditions.
Greater Visibility
The automotive supply chain depends on efficiency. It’s very common for companies to depend on things like just-in-time and just-in-sequence delivery of the components they need and to work to maintain just the right amount of inventory – not too much, not too little. Falling short in either of those ways can become expensive problems very quickly. Cognitive manufacturing solutions provide the end-to-end visibility needed to get ahead of problems that can throw a wrench into operations. For instance, a company could be notified if a labor shortage at a plant they rely on is impacting their ability to deliver as expected, creating a window of opportunity to quickly respond and mitigate those effects.
Cognitive Manufacturing Solutions for You
With deep industry and supply chain expertise, Bristlecone offers cognitive manufacturing solutions enable you to create faster and smarter design-to-production processes, accelerate time to market, and extend asset life with manufacturing insights, connected assets, intelligent automation and digital quality. Our solutions are driven by speed, transparency, connectivity and resiliency, meeting your needs both for today and tomorrow.
Contact us to get started.
