World Economic Forum Lighthouse Project: Rockwell 2022 Automation Perspectives

Summary

Kevin Laczkowski (pictured above) of McKinsey & Company provided an insightful presentation at the 2022 Rockwell Automation Perspectives event about the Global Lighthouse Network project. The Lighthouse project is a response to the global manufacturing industry lagging the adoption of advanced technologies. I have been following the Lighthouse project since its beginning, and it illustrates positive incremental manufacturing digitalization use cases. These types of projects are organizationally comfortable and acceptable incremental steps rather than revolutionary digital transformation.

World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network

The World Economic Forum Platform Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Value Chains set up the Global Lighthouse Network in collaboration with McKinsey and Company to help accelerate a more comprehensive and inclusive adoption of advanced technologies in manufacturing. 

"The future belongs to those companies willing to embrace disruption and capture new opportunities. The lighthouses are illuminating the future of manufacturing and the future of the industry," said Francisco Betti, head of Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Value Chains, World Economic Forum.

Since its launch in 2018, the Global Lighthouse Network and its more than 100 members have shown how Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)/Industry 4.0 technologies can drive performance and innovate supply chains improving everything from productivity and sustainability to workforce engagement.

The project has documented more than 100 Lighthouse Projects, with the majority being use cases applying technology for incremental continuous improvements yielding positive return on investments applying new technologies. Laczkowski emphasized the Lighthouse project was an idea to create something that would inspire manufacturing companies to understand the advantages of the application of digitalization. “The way this works is companies can nominate their facilities or their networks for lighthouses," he said. "There is a designation process and one hundred fourteen applications have earned Lighthouse designation since the project launched.”

 
Laczkowski described four characteristics that typically qualify as a lighthouse application:

1. Demonstrated positive impact
2. Multiple digital use cases deployed in parallel
3. Underlying playbook
4. Deploying scalable applications

“More recently there has been an introduction of sustainability lighthouses is given the push and sustainability," Laczkowski said. “This year for the first time 4 lighthouses were designated sustainability.”

Sectors and regions

Over half the Lighthouse projects are in Asia with approximately 10% North America. “The number is not very big, and our view is we are still in an early stage regardless of your industry or region.” “There are a lot of learnings and inspiration from Lighthouse applications.”


“In 2017 a lot of the energy was focused on productivity improvement and there is still a lot of energy there.” “More and more were seeing companies with his digital use cases to improve resilience and sustainability.” The impact demonstrated by Lighthouse projects have been in the areas of productivity improvement, resilience and agility, and more recently for sustainability improvements.



Laczkowski discussed how Global lighthouses achieve varying degrees of operational and financial performance improvement at both the factory and end-to-end levels and across a range of indicators. He showed a detailed slide summarizing the results. This and more information is available in a downloadable document: A manufacturer’s guide to scaling Industrial IoT February 5, 2021 | Report.

Companies interested in applying for Lighthouse recognition of a use case can email:  [email protected].
 

Industry Challenge: Incremental or Transformational Change

The industry challenge to be competitive and profitable is selecting digitalization strategy that is incremental or transformational, understanding the difference between incremental improvements that leverage new technology and manufacturing digital transformation.

Francisco Betti, head of Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Production for the World Economic Forum frames the issues, commenting, “As the world of production faces a perfect storm wrought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the accelerating climate emergency, raising trade tensions and growing economic uncertainty, manufacturers must develop new capabilities and adapt.” Betti suggests the manufacturing sector can only realize the full benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution if there is a complete transformation across value chains and production systems and diffusion of technology through their entire production networks that go beyond adding incremental tools to existing processes.