Smart Manufacturing

Foreword

Narendra Agrawal, PhD

Benjamin and Mae Swig Professor of Supply Chain AnalyticsLeavey School of BusinessSanta Clara University

It is with great pleasure that I write this foreword for Smart Manufacturing: The Lean Six Sigma Way. I want to congratulate the editor, Dr. Anthony Tarantino, for compiling this impressive volume. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book that discusses applications of the well-known Lean and Six Sigma (LSS) concepts in the new and emerging world of Smart Manufacturing, or Industry 4.0. I have no doubt that this book will turn out to be a great resource for practitioners, and hope that it will inspire academics to embark on new research opportunities in this sector.

What is distinct about the manufacturing environment is the potential for vast amounts of data that can be generated, stored, and analyzed. This data can relate to production processes as well as to the broader ecosystem of which the manufacturing process is a part. When I first started conducting research on issues related to the design of production systems and supply chains nearly three decades ago, my colleagues and I would often find the timely availability of sufficient data at the right level of granularity to be a major constraint. Consequently, we would have to rely on limited data sets, and extrapolate implications based on these results. However, the fantastic developments in our ability to generate, store, and access vast amounts of (big) data at unprecedented ...