Composability Is The Key To A Sustainable Future For Manufacturing

By Natan Linder and Erik Mirandette

Anyone who has walked onto a factory floor could tell you that things are complicated. And that’s an understatement. Manufacturing, almost definitionally, features variable inputs, unpredictability, and non-linear outcomes — both at the macro, global supply chain level and within the four walls of each manufacturing operation.

It’s a complex, dynamic system.

The complexity of that system is perhaps most clearly seen when you experience an issue — any issue. As a simple example, imagine you have 10 machines. What happens to output when one out of 10 machines goes down? Surely, that doesn’t just reduce your output to 90 percent instead of 100. With people, machines, and automated processes all collaborating toward the aim of production, the impact is largely unpredictable. (And that’s regardless of the cause of the failure. Maybe someone kicked out a power cord.)

The adaptive, dynamic nature of the system is visible in the hustle and bustle of operations. Simply put: When something happens, someone responds. There is a need to change behavior as conditions change.

No matter which material you’re turning into which product, manufacturing can’t escape its complex, dynamic nature.

Manufacturing operations leaders have long been encouraged to address that nature by using automation to minimize the variability that humans add to the system. Rightly so. The global labor shortage, supply chain volatility, and increased exposure to risk mean manufacturers often require process automation. Still, the promise of automation has largely gone unfulfilled.

Automation doesn’t do so well with making decisions when it encounters new problems. People, on the other hand, can naturally respond and learn as conditions change, making the issue of growing complexity an issue that people are uniquely well-suited to solve.

The nature of the system demands an adaptable approach to problem solving. That’s what lean is all about. That’s where composability comes in.

Composability is a system design principle which lets individuals satisfy specific user requirements at specific times. For it to come to fruition in manufacturing, vendors must commit to designing tools for the people closest to a given problem — thereby augmenting their capabilities, allowing for continuous improvement, and fueling transformation toward business sustainability.

Top-down approaches don’t work for business sustainability

Manufacturing operations are especially susceptible to the negative effects of top-down control, again, because of the system’s nature: Every manufacturing operation, and every station on it, is unique. The unique function of a station, and the unique skills and perspectives of the individual using it, aren’t one-size-fits-all — and neither are their demands. Forcing a one-size-fits-all approach onto unique challenges is exactly why top-down solutions fail.

It’s not as though you could get it right if you just picked the right tool. It’s that the principle of these implementations is flawed. The idea that any one third party could suddenly solve all of your problems, forever, and then you’ll never have to change again is false. When has it ever been true?

And yet, manufacturers have long accepted this top-down premise from vendors: That you should conform your operation to accommodate the data model and requirements of the technology, and that making changes (adapting) will mess things up.

Even as those on the frontlines “accept” the tool’s restrictions, new problems arise. (Imagine that!)

And because the system is dynamic, people continue to solve those new problems with other systems, like a pen and paper. They might embed a graph inside a Powerpoint and share it days after the fact. They might use lights as signals for errors.

However they work their way around a problem and share information, they’re the ones doing the work to solve the problem. Composable technology will enable that; traditional MES and manufacturing operations management (MOM) implementations will push toward workarounds and further silos.

And that’s not the only fundamental flaw of such an implementation.

The idea that a single application could solve all issues in a complex system isn’t wrong, per se. For instance, traffic is a complex, dynamic system, and Google Maps has found a way for individuals to solve their specific traffic problem using a single application. In that case, we all optimize toward the same output: “I am going from A to B and I need the fastest, shortest, least expensive way to get there.” And we’re all contributing the same data, adding feedback to hone the solution. Not so in manufacturing operations.

So, you need more than one application. For that, manufacturers may turn to point solutions. But stitching those point solutions together brings additional complexity and silos; information can’t be shared as needed (horizontally) and you’re still accommodating the technology’s data model and allowable integrations.

The bottom line: People are smart. If you put in a system that they have to strictly adhere to, instead of one that accommodates them, then they’ll find a workaround to get the job done (even if it’s old tech) to accommodate them.

In other words, they’ll solve the problems at hand with the tools they have. They’ll improve, but won’t be able to iterate. As the needs of the operation changes, the tools can evolve, too.

That’s why you have to work bottom up.

Composability as a bottom-up approach for creating sustainability

Manufacturing, as an industry, is quite familiar with constant change. But so often, individual operations get bogged down in static technology and processes. Both daily and long-term, operators find themselves just wishing for a way to be and stay adaptable.

Composable business is the answer. Composability, by nature, means that people are closer to both the solutions and the information they require. Because they’re already closest to the problem, doesn’t that just make sense?

A bottom-up approach (from human to application) creates real-time resilience. In a world where all manufacturing leaders are intimately familiar with uncertainty, we all know how necessary that resilience is. Here’s how it works:

When you roll out an architecture that supports composability, the endpoint of the rollout is the same as the endpoint of the rollout of a monolithic, immutable solution: Identifying and eliminating inefficiency and waste. But with composability, there’s no expectation of the big bang moment, where a switch is flipped.

Instead, through enabling horizontal information sharing and bottom-up application development, you get an emergent manufacturing system that fuels continuous improvement within your specific, unique operation. That’s right: Composability means you can always improve.

Rather than setting it and forgetting it, composability encourages the opposite. It provides your operators a set of tools that can solve their problems both today and tomorrow. It gives them the ability to work better and more efficiently. It gives them the information they need to do so. And it allows them to push that information to their colleagues, so they can also optimize, albeit toward varied outcomes.

Composability as a commitment

Now that we’ve said it, it may seem like a simple reality: You need to empower your people — all of your people — if you want to enable your business. And while that’s true, it’s also important to genuinely consider what composability says to your operators.

It says that people are the most valuable part of your operation. It says that you value their ability to augment the system, so you value your ability to help the system augment them.

The team at Tulip, a frontline operations platform, where I head up Product and Ecosystem, believes that a human-centric, composable approach is a requirement for manufacturing operations in order to scale and remain competitive. But beyond that, we believe that the democratization of both information and application development is fundamentally a good thing.

When you express that same belief through enabling your people with composability, the possible rewards are — without exaggeration — limitless.

This article was written by Erik Mirandette, head of Product and Ecosystem at Tulip Interfaces.