Lessons from a master of digital-first

Nowadays, every manufacturer aspires to be digital. Research published earlier this year by Gartner found 80% of CEOs in the sector are ramping up their investment in digital technology.

The leap from analog is, however, a daunting one. Challenges ranging from shortage of capital to a paucity of digital skills threaten to dent CEOs’ ambitions. IMD’s recently published Digital Vortex research, based on surveys of hundreds of business leaders worldwide, ranked manufacturing 13th out of 14 sectors in terms of its current pace of digital transformation.

One man untroubled by these pressures is Sven Kiontke, CEO and founder of asphericon, a specialist in high-precision manufacturing of lenses and optical equipment. From its beginnings more than 20 years ago, and well before the digital wave crashed through the manufacturing landscape, Kiontke has run asphericon as a digital business.

A computer scientist by training, Kiontke founded asphericon in 2001 in Jena, the Germany city that has been at the center of the optical industry since the mid-19th century. His ambition was to produce aspherical lenses – non-standard lenses manufactured to precise but irregular specifications – using machines controlled by software, rather than human operators. He developed the code for the task himself, turning down attractive job offers to invest all his time and energy in the venture.

Fast forward a decade or so and Kiontke’s vision had become a reality – a reality that others were looking to emulate. “In 2012 I took a call from a market researcher who asked me when asphericon might adopt some of the practices of ‘Industry 4.0,’” he says. “I had to ask him what the term meant but, when I explained we had been running our manufacturing digitally for more than 10 years, there was a long silence.”

Asphericon, in other words, has a genuine claim to be one of the world’s first digital manufacturers. So, what advice does Kiontke have for manufacturing businesses now scrambling to follow his lead? He points to seven key lessons that he’s learned along the way.

Digitize for the business, not the technology providers

Developers often produce breakthrough technologies and then search for a problem to which these technologies are the solution. But for many manufacturers, the key is to identify the issue that needs fixing and then look to develop the technology that provides the solution.

“Aspherical lens production was a manual process, requiring highly experienced operators to proceed by trial and error – polishing a little more here and a little less there,” says Kiontke. “We know we had to create a deterministic function that would work time and again.”

“Our next issue was the measurement machine, using which you had to move one pixel at a time. Operators were spending more time measuring than machining, so we locked ourselves in a room for a week and developed software to automate the whole process. It saved a huge amount of time and money, and it massively improved quality.”

The lesson, then, is that digital transformation starts when manufactures identify the specific problems they face.

Automate, automate, automate

Digitization in manufacturing often begins as a piecemeal process, with manual interventions still required at significant moments in the value chain. But the digitization of each additional step in the production cycle will deliver additional benefits. Moreover, a successful transformation will manage the cycle as a whole.