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Leveraging technology to improve manufacturing operations

CPGs, OEMs and contract packagers gather at PMMI's Top to Top Summit to discuss how to improve obsolescence management and incorporate robotics, augmented reality and virtual reality to advance their operations.

At PMMI's Top to Top Summit, CPGs, OEMs and contract packagers discussed the most significant operational challenges they face and opportunities to collaborate. Image courtesy of PMMI.
At PMMI's Top to Top Summit, CPGs, OEMs and contract packagers discussed the most significant operational challenges they face and opportunities to collaborate. Image courtesy of PMMI.

PMMI conducted its 14th annual Top to Top Summit this past spring at the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa in Ponte Vedra, Florida. The impetus for PMMI’s Top to Top Summit is its Vision 2025 sessions. Together with the OpX Leadership Network, the trio comprises PMMI’s suite of continuous improvements forums in which consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and contract packagers gather to discuss some of the most significant operations challenges they face and opportunities to collaborate on solution development. (Discovery at Vision 2025, Discussion at Top to Top and Solutions from the OpX Leadership Network.)

The findings from the 2019 Top to Top Summit focused on three critical areas:

1. Collaboration and innovation for improved obsolescence management.

2. Leveraging robotics on the road to automation.

3. Utilizing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for remote equipment access and beyond.

So what do obsolescence management, robotics, and augmented and virtual reality have in common? From the perspective of this year’s Top to Top participants, it is more than meets the eye. In fact, there was a common, unified theme that coursed its way through all the panel conversations and roundtable discussions: balancing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change with people’s ever-diminishing ability to keep up with it. 

In 1922, William F. Ogburn, a sociologist, was one of the earliest thought leaders to show that innovation, especially technological innovation, advances at a faster pace, whereas societal norms tend to resist change and move slower. He referred to the gap between the two as cultural lag. This cultural lag was an underlying current for much of the discussion among the participants at Top to Top and is the focus of both the challenges they face and the solutions they’re putting into play to address them. The following are just a few dominant examples.

When it comes to obsolescence management, they cite their greatest challenges as keeping up with many technology platforms and anticipating what’s coming down the pike. But to narrow the gap, they cite proactive communications between CPGs and OEMs and the ability to conduct risk assessments so they can better understand the effects of obsolescence as the greatest opportunities for solutions. 

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