Elly Neyret
PRT engineering project manager
Matthieu Bernard
PRT mechanical engineering project manager
As you know, technology is evolving rapidly, and what was true 5 years ago no longer is. Staying competitive through continuous innovation is essential. That’s why it’s so important to set up an effective technology watch for your manufacturing business!
Whether you want to initiate an investment project within your plant or simply modernize your outdated equipment, this step is crucial to help you meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges in various fields:
- Automation
- Process Optimization
- Supply Chain Management
By carrying out this preliminary work, you’ll be able to analyze the best technological opportunities to meet your various challenges: increasing your production capacity, productivity or coping with labor shortages, for example.
This article explains what you need to know before deploying your technology watch, to ensure that it benefits your project.
In particular, you’ll find a summary table to help you understand when is the right time to set up your technology watch.
1. The Benefits of a Technology Watch
By keeping up to date with the latest innovations, a technology watch is designed to offer you added value as well as numerous financial gains and benefits.
- Reduce risks: monitor regulatory developments and new production standard. This will enable you to anticipate future regulations.
- Improve your productivity and competitiveness. Increase your production rate and reduce your costs. Work on breakthrough projects with greater added value. By taking a technological leap forward, you’ll stay ahead of your competitors.
- Optimize your machines: save energy and space, reduce maintenance costs.
- Solve labor challenges with automation gains.
- Identify opportunities based on situations that can be transposed to your business. This watch will also enable you to look at technological advances in other manufacturing sectors and adapt them to your sector.
2. Integrate Technological Intelligence into your Working Methods
A technology watch will generate projects, at the very least by triggering a feasibility study. It can also be integrated into the heart of a project.
That’s why technology watch should be an integral and systematic part of your working practices. Whether you devote 4 hours or 4 days to it, depending on the complexity of your project, technology watch must be considered as part of each and every one of your projects: automation, plant layout, increased flows, smart factories.
Whatever the nature of your project, the benefits of technology watch include the following:
- Automation Project: a technology watch will ensure that your automation project complies with legal requirements and industry standards.
- Smart Factory Project: a technology watch will enable you to identify the best existing solutions on the market for adding value to your data in real time, and may enable you to enrich your specifications for machine purchases with technological criteria that facilitate data collection.
- Plant Refurbishment Project: a technology watch will help you avoid investing in obsolete technologies, or technologies that could quickly become obsolete and lead to additional replacement or upgrading costs. It could also give you a head start on your competitors by making a quantum leap.
3. When is the Best Time to Deploy your Technology Watch?
When we think of technology watch, we often wonder when it’s best to implement it: in the pre-project, validation or project execution phase?
Note that the benefits, risks and financial costs associated with your technology watch will vary according to the phase of the project in which you are going to deploy it.
- click on the table to view
Conclusion
By enabling you to keep up to date with the latest technological innovations, technology watch offers many gains and benefits to your manufacturing business:
• Stay competitive and productive
• Optimize your machinery
• Identify your opportunities
• Reduce the risk of non-compliance
• Solve workforce issues
However, in order to deliver these benefits, it’s important to remember that technology watch must be systematically integrated into your working methods, whether it’s at the outset of a project or at the heart of it.
Our summary table shows the many advantages of deploying your technology watch at the right time. Deploying it too early will cost you time, while deploying it too late will cost you a lot in terms of modifications.
As an engineering consulting firm, Merkur keeps abreast of the latest technologies and regulations in real time. We can help you save time in your monitoring thanks to our expertise. For more information, contact our experts!
