In Stay Sharp Episode 105, Revolutionizing Manufacturing: Redefining the Digital Footprint, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant welcome a guest who’s promoting new solutions—and a new mindset—for manufacturing operations. Devin Patel is Head of Solutions at First Resonance, an organization that’s challenging the traditional thinking that there aren’t options between manual processes and full-scale enterprise platforms. Devin offers real solutions and use cases for how to take a more incremental and success-driven approach to improving and digitizing your business systems.
Just Because it’s Typical, Doesn’t Mean it’s Right For You
Traditional enterprise implementations represent enormous effort, impact, and investment, and they often involve focusing intently on one need or system, to the detriment of other teams or processes that also need help. Devin notes, “These ERP, CRM, PLM implementations, integrations can take a long time. Sometimes they can take years. They can cost a lot of money. Then for some reason, even though an MES is extremely important … that’s a lower priority. And all of a sudden, five years goes by and you’re wondering why you’re still more inefficient than you should be.”
He argues that’s not how to get help for digital operations quickly. “It doesn’t have to take years,” he says. “It doesn’t have to take a company-wide adoption of these very clunky traditional tools for you to get the value you need right away. The other way is just by connecting a backbone and solving one problem at a time. Really, what these companies are looking for is a data footprint.” By focusing more on capabilities and less on systems, Devin and First Resonance can help customers improve visibility, traceability, and team collaboration right away. He adds, “We’re redefining the way you bring all of these systems in, to just solving use cases. And it does make things very, very nice for customers.”
Devin explains the two revolutionary ideas First Resonance brings to the table. First, you should focus on your data and how you need it to move around and support your operations, rather than making your needs fit into the standard structure of a large enterprise system. Second, you can take a modular approach and solve just one problem at a time, instead of trying to solve every need for every team all at once. Jonathan says, “Think in terms of data footprint. What capabilities do you need and what data do you need to support it? And one of the important things to think about there is how does that data need to be connected? So it’s not just a data set, but it is a footprint of how all those things work together.”
Who This is For
Devin acknowledges that this modular, incremental approach isn’t targeted at large manufacturers that already have big enterprise platforms in place. It’s really for smaller companies – startups, or even those that have been around for a while – that need more support than paper – or Excel-based processes can offer, but that don’t have the time or need for a large platform implementation. “It’s nimble, it’s very flexible in the ability to say, Hey, I got that data footprint,” Jonathan says. “It’s doing exactly what I need and nothing more.” The benefit, Devin explains, “Is less time and money focusing on building your technical stack and your technical systems, and a lot more time building your actual product and shipping that out to your customers and building your business.
But adding capabilities one need at a time doesn’t mean that there’s no long-term thought about your system structure or evolving needs. According to Devin, the point is also to anticipate and look ahead to what you think you might require to meet all of your goals for the next few years, as well as consider what that entails for your support systems. “We know that it’s not going to be exactly like that in five years,” he says. “Everything’s going to change, especially with agentic AI and how people are getting information now, that’s going to be different.” But you will start with a path that can be adapted as you need more flexibility over the years. Still, it’s always about the systems in service to your organization’s needs, Devin says. “With our customers, the main thing we focus on is outcomes.”
Learn More About Modular, Data-Driven Solutions
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including the kinds of amazing work being accomplished by small teams who’ve taken this approach to their digital data needs, why Devin says there isn’t just one right way to build a digital thread, what three relatively recent innovations are enabling this data-driven solution, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 105: Revolutionizing Manufacturing: Redefining the Digital Footprint and join us each week for a new podcast.
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