"What should we model?" That's our goal. Actually, the goal has always been there: short cycle time, high flexibility, low cost, high efficiency, reconfigurability, rapid response, and green, lean, refined, transparent, resilient, or adaptive and self-organizing, etc. Even when facing new business models or industry forms, for a manufacturing company, these excellent genes or performance characteristics are a perpetual pursuit.
Achieving these goals essentially boils down to "how to transform," and that's the key point. In fact, the question of how to transform has been a continuous pursuit in both academia and industry. Since the 863 CIMS project, various advanced manufacturing models have emerged, such as concurrent engineering, agile manufacturing, lean production, rapid response, agile adaptation, total quality management, mass customization, diffusion manufacturing, cloud manufacturing, manufacturing grids, APS (application service provider), and networked collaborative manufacturing, among others. These models continue to evolve. All these advanced models describe manufacturing outcomes from various perspectives, whether comprehensive or partial, technical or business-related, and each carries its own methodology and even implementation path. These are the underlying principles that we can refer to and should implement for digital transformation. Without them, digitalization is just empty talk; frankly, it's merely a means to an end.
Let me interject a bit. The intelligent manufacturing we've been discussing (smart manufacturing) is one area we've focused on developing, but it's only one. To some extent, intelligent manufacturing is merely a preference for intelligence or a one-sided pursuit of certain (intelligent) characteristics in manufacturing. While the term "intelligent" carries a certain linguistic dominance, whether it can truly encompass or be compatible with the aforementioned advanced manufacturing models is a matter of debate. In fact, from a company's perspective, different companies have different pursuits regarding advanced manufacturing models; intelligence doesn't seem to be a panacea. Furthermore, it's worth noting that the very word "intelligent" could potentially cause companies to lose sight of what they should truly be pursuing.
Let's return to the original narrative. For digital transformation, what we should truly pursue is using digital means to transform, improve, and shape the industry.
However, to emphasize digital means, we must explain or analyze what aspects cannot be transformed or achieved without digitalization, thus making us so eager to use digital methods. This shifts the question to how to leverage the advantages of digitalization, and even what disruptive changes or changes that digitalization can bring that are more in line with enterprise development and enhance competitive advantage.
