Making Profitability & Sustainability a Reality

The State of Sustainable Manufacturing

There’s a lot that’s happened in the last two years, so we have a lot to talk about. We’re facing perhaps some of the most significant disruption that we’ve seen in a long time. Challenges regarding resource efficiency. Challenges sourcing raw materials. Challenges maintaining competitive advantage. And while we are looking at addressing those issues, on top of that, we’re being faced with the need reduce greenhouse gas emissions with real verifiable metrics. So we need to talk about sustainability.

That’s why we’ve really chosen this as the theme of our conference this year: making profitability and sustainability a reality. And although covering this topic in two days is probably a bit ambitious, we are going to do our best to arm you with best practices and valuable insights to help you address these challenges. You’ll discover how the evolution of our manufacturing capabilities, as well as new features from our manufacturing insights platform, are going to support you in optimizing costs, improving manufacturability issues, and reducing carbon emissions.

We all know that over the past 12 months, we’ve really been faced with a number of challenges. Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years. I don’t need to tell you that — you just need to go to the gas station and try and fill up your car. And product-price-performance , that ratio has always been a hot topic for manufacturing, but looking at the escalation of material prices and manufacturing costs, that’s really moved to the very top of the list this year in terms of challenges we have to address. Then there is global supply chain disruption. That’s another hot topic that started three years ago before the pandemic. We saw that in spades. There were times during the pandemic — really at the beginning — where companies like Ford were burning a billion dollars a week because they couldn’t get products out the door. Many companies had to completely change their production processes. It was alarming. Now, while the pandemic’s ebbed, the challenge of supply chain disruptions have continued.

So we really have to figure out how we’re going to move forward and address that. Companies have put in place short-term fixes, but we need to develop long-term strategies that are going to help us build resilient supply chain networks for future generations of leaders.

Then there is the labor and skills gap. How many of you have been trying to hire people lately? That’s been a topic for five years — a long time— but it’s becoming more and more of a concern. Companies are looking for new strategies to address this challenge, and they’re looking at some different ways, it’s not just about better recruiting to find better respondents, but how can we automate some of the processes? So maybe it requires energy efficiency with labor, or leveraging digital twins, and digital threads to support new engineering employees.

And then lastly, sustainability. The threat of climate change and the push towards a circular economy is making stakeholders demand new KPIs around environmental performance. So companies must now track new metrics and report on their sustainable practices to the financial community.

It’s not just about us trying to do better for the world. There are all kinds of regulatory bodies that are coming into play. And while manufacturing companies are trying to work on plans to achieve their low-carbon objectives, they’re facing a number of obstacles. How is it going to impact my cost? What is it going to do to my competitiveness? How is it going to impact me overall?

Rather than trying to cover these all in one slide, I’m going to take you through at least some of the things we’re seeing in the market, and some of the ways in which we’re trying to help mitigate these issues.

Becoming a Sustainable Business: How to Deliver Higher Profitability During Economic Disruption

Challenge number one is how to deliver higher profitability during major economic disruptions. Just this topic alone is a big one, so believe me, I won’t keep you here all day. Inflation is a significant driver of cost — we all know that — but companies need to keep their products competitive to drive growth. So that’s a tough balance. In terms of product policies, just focusing on cost alone isn’t good enough to maintain competitive advantage. In most industrial sectors, we see new competitors emerging every year. Who would have thought 20 years ago that consumer lifestyles would change to favor renewable startups like Tesla or Arrival. These companies are brand new startups in an industry that’s been around for a long time. And many are building new technology platforms right from scratch. They’re using digital models and approaches to disrupt the traditional players in the market. A recent analysis of S&P 500 companies showed that these new players can make the game really challenging for some of the well-established companies. Some have started on the premise of sustainable development. But then, we see many established companies reuse the startup mindset. Many of you are adopting digital approaches to both optimize cost and driving innovation. Some are approaching this by digitizing prototypes. They’re saying that two years from now they won’t have any physical prototypes, which is an example of sustainable development.

We’re seeing other companies who are looking to create a more digital interaction between buyers and suppliers, enabling that process to go much faster. And then there are others who are taking a more end-to-end look: what can we do to digitize a whole process from design to production? Whatever the approach to sustainable business, the goals are the same: reducing cost while accelerating time to market and through shorter product development cycles. We’re seeing product development cycles collapse—getting shorter and shorter. Automotive firms a few years ago had product design cycles that were four years. Now in some cases, we’re hearing they’re down to 18 months. So whatever the approach, we need to take action. If we want to be around and relevant 10 years from now, we need to accomplish our cost and revenue objectives concurrently. So a key question for both you and us is: how do we reduce cost while creating value? That’s a complex task, and we’ve seen several different approaches that companies are pursuing with their initiatives.

Reducing the Cost of Inputs Promotes Sustainable Business

When it comes to initiatives that deliver value for sustainable business, cost reduction is front and center. Exploring multiple design options, and looking at the different trade-off metrics, helps you not only figure out how to take cost out of what you’re designing, but add features that give you a more competitive advantage in the market while still maintaining cost. Getting feedback quickly and continuously helps to improve the competitiveness of a new products significantly. Optimizing the manufacturability of parts and assemblies for the production process is another huge factor. Doing it upfront increases the design team’s efficiency, helping reduce late-stage churn and reduce time to market. And the one other competitive advantage that we’re seeing as a result of a digitized production process is it helps free up those design teams to work on the next new product earlier. And while product design cycles are shortening, procurement teams are more challenged than ever, to get product inputs in the door quickly and parts in the door quickly.

Often they’re over-paying. I talked to one executive not too long ago who said he doesn’t have enough time between when his design team finishes their new product design and sourcing needs to get parts in the door to be able to have them on the market to drive revenue. And so one of the things he recognized is that they’re buying things at higher cost than they want to because they have to move so fast. One of the things he recognize when started to see his teams using aPriori is there’s all this rich data that’s now available to sourcing teams, to enable them to look at what’s coming down the product pipelines earlier, so that they can start those conversations with suppliers. That data enables them to do life cycle thinking which is really valuable for sourcing teams. And engaging Sourcing and Procurement earlier helps reduce the cost of inputs, minimize supply chain risks, and improve time to market materially.

Manage Financial Risk Through Sustainable Consumption

One way to manage risk is to use design-to-cost as key component of the production process. If your digital factories represent your current supply base, they’re going to provide the design team with manufacturability and cost feedback based on your current manufacturing capabilities. If they have the right informational inputs, they’re designing new products with the supply chain in mind. You’re connecting that design to the ecosystem that you’re interacting with as your products come to market. That leads to a sustainable consumption of resources for the long term. At aPriori we’ve been evolving our capabilities to meet these needs, and our sessions are focused to help you really make a material impact.

Now, even with all of those sustainable business practices I just talked about, we’re still seeing companies leverage spreadsheets and access databases, which can help with cost but seriously impact value creation metrics, especially on the revenue side. A recent Gartner article focused on the mistakes that you need to avoid when you’re trying to reduce costs, and they highlighted that only 9% of organizations create enough capacity in their budgets to take on the growth and innovation opportunities they want to pursue. Aggressive cost reductions can drain a company’s natural resources away from high-impact innovation projects, indefinitely delaying funding to the point where competitors can hurdle right past you. Gartner also noted that these companies miss the opportunity to increase their competitive advantage when they miss the boat on adopting digital technologies. And without doing that, it permanently reduces opportunities for the value that sustainable production gains could deliver to future generations of stakeholders.

Digital technologies can help you permanently reduce the cost of doing business. It’s a significant impact that enables companies to outperform their competition during a looming downturn. We saw this play out in the 2009 economic crisis. One of our customers was able to use aPriori’s technology to reduce costs enough to continue to fund an engineering team. And as they came out of the downturn, they were able to release new products ahead of their competitors. In fact, their revenue grew and doubled over the five years following the recession. And this quick ramp up became a competitive advantage. So as we look at this case study, we can see that sustainable production is being thoughtful about the balance between cost reduction and value creation. This is incredibly important to aPriori. Hearing how our stakeholders are trying to balance cost-reduction activities against value creation is key to us.

Examples of Digital Twin Reuse for Sustainable Production

The more you can share with us about the challenges you’re facing, as well as the opportunities you’re trying to pursue, the more we can prioritize what capabilities we’re developing in our applications. Our user applications like aP Design, aP Pro in our enterprise platform, and our cost modeling capabilities help you address the challenges and the opportunities ahead. From a user perspective, aP Pro continues to evolve. We’re focusing on delivering very quick, accurate should costs and manufacturing insights that are driven by the assessment of your digital twins. When you reuse your CAD models to deliver insights through aPriori, you get visibility into costs, as well as detailed manufacturing insights. aPriori uses your digital twins to create what-if scenarios that enable you to compare different production processes and input alternatives. And you get metrics you can use, such as refined cost estimates and low carbon calculations.

This technology is getting more and more adoption by our customers because they are looking to impact costs from the earliest stages of the new product design process. aP Design helps accelerate product innovation while anticipating the manufacturability issues that can really slow down time to market due to late-stage churn. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen broad adoption of our technologies across many different use cases, and you’re going to hear a couple of case studies about how customers are deploying this technology not only in one area but across the complete product life cycle. The deployment of our technology—I’m very happy to say—has resulted in over half a billion dollars in reduced cost of goods in just in the past couple of years alone. And that doesn’t reflect the accelerated revenue generated by those of you who are using aPriori to quote faster, quote more accurately, and win bids.

Whatever your role is in your organizational ecosystem, we have been designed training to help you understand the technologies you can use to bring life cycle thinking into your role in the production process. We’ve also been busy improving our cost models, and as you know, our cost models are based on realistic manufacturing simulations are at the core of our technology. We work to continuously improve those manufacturing simulations, as well as the data in our digital factories, to enable you to create a digital factory twin that represents either your own internal factories or that of your supply base. In the past year, we’ve released enhancements to a number of our existing models, as well as introduced several new models including compression molding, roll forming, and enhancements to machining.

Now, what’s very interesting that some of you may not know about is that aPriori is leveraging the same core technology that we use to generate cost insights, and address manufacturability issues, to evaluate the environmental impacts of your products with real metrics on carbon impact. The new tools for sustainability will help you — throughout the course of your normal product development process — prevent environmental degradation, measure the environmental impacts of your new product designs, and improve the sustainability posture of current products.

Supply Chain Sustainability Is Part of Sustainable Business

Now let’s talk about supply chain sustainability and how mitigating supply chain risk is critical to becoming a sustainable business. To maintain a competitive advantage, manufacturers today need to build a resilient and agile supply chain network that can withstand future disruptions. And this is critical. In a recent article from McKinsey, they estimated that a short disruption of just 30 days—just 30 days or less—can put a 3% to 5% EBITDA margin at stake. These days, we just can’t afford that. So to create supply chain resilience, it’s important to think about leveraging technology that drives supply chain transformation to both accelerate speed as well as drive procurement from a diversity of sources.

Here are some ideas that we’re seeing to help sustainable businesses create supply chain resilience. The first is negotiating with suppliers based on accurate estimates that match supplier costs. You need to be on the same page with the stakeholders in your supplier network to come to a quick outcome that’s meaningful to both sides, without impacting the quality of service quality that your suppliers deliver.

Another key to creating supply chain resilience is implementing sustainable practices that reduce process complexity, and empower buyers to facilitate quote-less sourcing. That can reduce errors as well as result in a quick turnaround time, providing early visibility into product requirements and manufacturing capabilities needed for faster supplier selection. If your sourcing team is engaged in life cycle thinking and is looking at what’s coming down the pipe from engineering, everyone is going to be able to work faster.

To drive resource efficiency, you need to have earlier fact-based conversations with suppliers. When you have data earlier, you can start having those conversations earlier. And then developing a strong supplier partnership, through shared visibility of requirements and full understanding of the supplier capabilities, drives a much more efficient production process as well as a better outcome. These aren’t just ideas that I came up with yesterday for this presentation. All of these are tactics that we see many of you incorporating as you evolve your approaches to procurement by incorporating initiatives that benefit the entire sourcing ecosystem.

These are great tactics. But how do you turn those tactics into structural resiliency so that you can be prepared for the future? Well, it requires the implementation of new ways of working. Leveraging the digital twin. Modeling end-to-end process from a product design to a production perspective.

4 Ways Sustainable Supply Chain = Sustainable Business

In a recent article, McKinsey suggests there are four main steps to building long-term supply chain resilience:

1. Construct a digital twin of the most critical parts of your supply chain. The digital factory enables you to understand what’s happening in the manufacturing process and how it could impact your production from a manufacturability and cost perspective.
2. Build what-if scenarios. Consider building several what-if scenarios that can be tested quickly, varying inputs, production processes, and environmental impact. We see customers doing this testing — not only to compare whether to make it here or there, but even to create future factories. Last night I was talking with a number of you looking at moving some of your production facilities from Asia to Mexico. What if you could model those digital factories and compare the differences between cost of raw materials, costs of labor, and output potential in Asia versus Mexico?
3. Share Data. Sharing data with suppliers is critical. You don’t need to have a completely open book with every supplier in your ecosystem. We see customers using data sharing to create a more strategic collaboration with suppliers in which they disclose selective information in specific contexts. One of our industrial equipment customers did a great case study on this, where they talked about how they used aPriori’s should-cost models to do fact-based negotiation, and they got a lot of costs out that way. But then, what they recognized is that they could take that even further if they could raise the conversation to a manufacturing discussion. So they brought aPriori’s data on manufacturability into the conversation with their suppliers. They said: according to insights from our aPriori factory models, the most efficient production processes are these ones. And the supplier said, Well, I’m doing something different. So through that conversation, this customer was able to reduce costs significantly. And it’s a win-win for all stakeholders, because the supplier got to maintain their margin. This is a whole new dynamic of sustainable business that we’re seeing that many companies evolve to.
4. To build structural reform, you need to take action now. If you don’t act today, it’s going to have significant impacts over the next 10 years. This methodology: leveraging the digital twin, creating the digital process, and leveraging the aPriori Manufacturing Insights platform is key to building a sustainable business, but only if you take action.

Sustainable Business Case Study #1 – Zero RFQs

I’d like to share a customer story that is a great example of a sustainable business.

I know a number of you have heard about Alstom and the great things they do with what they call their zero RFQ strategy. What they’ve done over the past few years evolved their relationships with strategic suppliers to create a more open, transparent discussion. Then they work with those suppliers to understand the exact makeup of their factories, and they leverage that data to create digital factories in aPriori. When they go through the new product design process, they get the manufacturability feedback from aPriori, and at the end of the design process, they print out a cost report out of aPriori. Instead of sending out requests for quotes and waiting to get quotes back, they print a report out of aPriori and that’s the Purchase Order. They can skip the quoting process and go right to the PO because the digital factory in aPriori represents exactly the capabilities and the costs of those suppliers. Now the supplier checks the PO to make sure that they didn’t miss anything, especially if it’s a new part or a new product, and then they send the okay back, or they iterate to cover the things that they missed.

This zero RFQ process has enabled them to reduce their quoting time from a couple of weeks to just a few hours. That’s a significant reduction.

The Benefits of Zero RFQ Initiatives Include:

1. Accelerating time to revenue
2. Significant reduction in costs
3. Getting products to market faster
4. Realizing the revenue value from these activities sooner

Sustainable Business Case Study #1 – Closing the Labor Gap

Let’s look at closing the labor and skills gap. The skills gap is very real. Only 61% of companies really feel that college graduates are adequately prepared and trained. And that would be okay, but the job openings still are continuing to outpace the number of applicants that are in the market today.

Forbes actually expanded on this in the context of the manufacturing industry. Forbes interviews a cross-section of manufacturing companies about the preparedness of their workforce. What they found was this.

The Labor Gap in Manufacturing

Students are able to use CAD effectively. They’ve been well trained on CAD for new product development. And They’re able to use CAD to design great products.

Students don’t know whether a design is manufacturable or not. They’re creating great designs, but can they be manufactured? Not necessarily.

The skills gap is creating a huge challenge to the production process that ends up impacting delays to market.

This is where aPriori’s Manufacturing Insights platform really plays a role. Powered by the manufacturing simulations in our digital factories, it can help accelerate design engineers’ productivity by quantifiable metrics. Up to 70% in some cases.

By detecting manufacturability issues early in the design stages, industrial manufacturing companies are able to reduce costly iterations, accelerate product development cycles, and develop critical design engineering skills faster. In just the past few weeks alone, I’ve had several conversations with VPs of Engineering who have talked about the challenges they’re having bringing in young design engineers. These young designers are able to get up and running on the CAD system, but the new products they’re building aren’t manufacturable. I have to share this one example. One VP of Engineering showed me this great bracket. It was a beautiful bracket, and they were going to be making tens of thousands of these. It was very thoughtfully designed and it had many features. But — and this is a big but — it was going to be too expensive and too hard to manufacture.

So they had to go back to the design phase, and there was very little of the initial work they could reuse. And that was just a bracket. This case study brought home to me that without a background understanding of what’s manufacturable and what’s not, the production process is plagued by these challenges.

In addition to manufacturability feedback, there are other initiatives that can help reduce the labor and skills gaps significantly, specifically automation and collaboration. With new product development cycles shortening, market feedback is arriving faster than ever before. In addition to that, new competitors are looming on the horizon.

Automation helps new design engineers become much more efficient and enables them to learn faster— maintaining your competitive advantage. And digital collaboration enables your experts—your manufacturing and cost experts—to work in a more scalable way with those new design engineers or sourcing professionals that are coming on board so that you can reuse your in house expertise and really magnify the impact of your experts.

aPriori’s aP Generate is all about automation. I know a few of you have had significant exposure to automation, but I don’t know if you’re aware that automation is also enabling faster feedback for design engineers. Checking parts into the PLM system triggers aP Generate to conduct the systematic analysis of these components, and that proactively lets design engineers know about manufacturability and cost issues that could delay their time to market. aP Generate even offers suggestions about how to mitigate manufacturability and cost issues so that they can act on them. Thus, the skills of design engineers increase when they’re using aP Generate, because they’re continuously exposed to feedback and guidance, and the cost of products decreases while the manufacturability issues decline significantly.

I want to share a quote from Sam Freesmeyer, the former Vice President of Engineering at AGCO. He was talking about the impact that automation can have, and here’s what he said: “Our customers rely on us to provide solutions that deliver more productivity and cost less. AP Generate helps us meet that need. It automates much of the cost optimization that we currently do manually, helping us to bring designs into production faster to support critical product schedules and lead times.”

That’s feedback from one of the customers who’s working with aP Generate. And following this session, Carrier is going to talk about not only how they’re using automation, but how they’re using all of aPriori’s technology to enable them to drive costs down while improving efficiency.

To achieve those faster cycle times, everybody across the product development ecosystem: engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, and cost engineers, really has to work together more than ever before to meet the demands of shorter timeframes. Collaboration is really key. It is a critical initiative to improve productivity, as well as to reduce the labor skills gap.

An interesting survey from Deloitte of US manufacturing companies confirmed the feedback that you’ve been giving us about collaboration. Deloitte’s survey found that US manufacturers showed a strong commitment to accelerating the development of collaboration platforms and tools. But collaboration tools alone don’t solve the problem. There’s still the issue of inconsistency of data across all the different phases of the product development life cycle. So you need to be looking at those two things in tandem: platform and data.

If you can share the same data across all the different stakeholders in your ecosystem, then collaboration becomes a whole lot easier. That’s why we developed aP Workspace. The aP Workspace application unifies the disconnected product teams and data. And it also provides a robust co-working and task management environment to enable product designs to be optimized for cost, sustainability, and manufacturability. It delivers these metrics by leveraging aPriori’s manufacturing and cost models at its core.

Metrics of Success for Digital Initiatives

How much impact can an initiative really have? Let’s look at some metrics. We’ve shared numerous case studies over the last 10 years at our conferences, but recently, we engaged Forrester Research to investigate this further and really quantify the impact.

Forrester just released the results of their study on the total economic impact that aPriori has over the first three years of deployment. Forrester found that aPriori generated a 603% ROI. That 603% return on investment came through two sources:

1. Efficiencies generated by design engineering teams contributed about $2.5 million in savings.
2. Reduction of about $20 million in procurement spend over the course of the three years.

The interesting part is that they got an initial payback in less than six months. That shows you can get up and running very quickly. What’s even more interesting is that those results were based on analyzing only 2% cost of goods in year one, 3% in year two, and 4% in year three. If you’d like to learn more about the analysis, you don’t have to take it from me. We’ve posted the Forrester report on our website so you can dig into the details.

The Challenge of Sustainable Production

So here is the last challenge of the day. How to deliver higher profitability during economic disruption as well as starting to address sustainability.

There have been a lot of conversations about sustainability for a couple of years now, with manufacturers talking about renewables, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and moving to a circular economy. But what we’re hearing now is that companies are really looking at moving from intent to impact.

Moving from intent to impact on sustainability sounds great, except that Bain has identified a really big challenge. Only 12% of all corporate change initiatives really succeed. That’s bad enough, but the success rate for sustainability initiatives is substantially lower: it’s a paltry 4%. That’s not very good. So why bother? Well, the pressure for companies to reduce their environmental impacts is increasing. According to the World Economic Forum, manufacturing represents 54% of the world’s energy consumption and is responsible for 20% of global emissions. And the WEF also found that increases in efficiency driven by technology can materially help to reduce consumption and CO2 emissions.

Now, McKinsey is also looking at this. They spent a lot of time studying sustainable production initiatives, and they’ve confirmed that companies are trying to make changes, but they’re having challenges. And so they even took it a step further. What McKinsey has done is they’ve launched their sustainability academy to help companies move forward on their sustainability initiatives. Now, through their consulting, McKinsey found that although many companies have a clearly defined sustainability strategy (even 100% in some sectors of the economy) only 40% believe that they have the knowledge and the capabilities to achieve their targets. And it isn’t surprising. It’s an incredibly complex area, and at times it’s massively counterintuitive.

But the business drivers to move sustainability initiatives from intent to impact are powerful. It’s both revenue and risk. If you look at it from a revenue perspective, customers demand more sustainable products and are willing to pay more for low-carbon products that fit their lifestyles. That’s a great opportunity, right?

And then from a policy perspective, you have a lot of different new legislation and regulations that are putting pressure on companies to act and to reduce carbon emissions, whether it’s the EU taxonomy or the SEC. So, that’s a real impetus.

But although lifecycle assessment is a popular approach for manufacturing companies to define the environmental impacts of their products over their lifecycle, lifecycle assessment can be complex and time-consuming. And while lifecycle assessment is well known by industrial manufacturing companies, it doesn’t provide the guidance to reduce the CO2 footprint of a product and its environmental impacts. Most industrial companies we’re talking to are looking for guidance to quickly identify the products that are the biggest CO2 offenders and replace them with low-carbon options, or bring in sustainable production practices that improve energy efficiency, in order to drive down CO2 emissions and improve environmental impact.

To help companies meet that challenge, we’re introducing aPriori Sustainability insights. aPriori Sustainability is designed to help you generate the impact you need by providing feedback on the carbon impact of your design decisions as well as the carbon impact of your manufacturing and sourcing decisions. So the design engineer, as he’s iterating on his design and looking at adding new capabilities and figuring out what the cost might be, he can also understand the impact of those decisions on carbon. He can improve the energy efficiency of new products before they’re ever released to the market. And cost engineers, sourcing and procurement professionals, and manufacturing professionals can also be using that data to understand how different production processes can impact their carbon footprint. By leveraging the same core technology that generates our cost and manufacturability insights, we can now give you sustainability metrics all within same application.

In summary, we see aPriori customers supporting their users across the product development life cycle by using aPriori’s manufacturing insights platform in 5 key ways:

1. Quoting. Using aPriori to reduce the time to quote, increase the win rate, and using the same resources to generate more quotes.
2. Product Development. Early in the R&D cycle, aPriori helps designers evaluate concept designs and think about the ramifications of those concepts. These include design to cost, design to source, and design for manufacturability. aPriori’s early feedback on product development helps teams forecast new product costs, reduce time to market, and do outlier analysis to find where they should start to look for cost reduction opportunities.
3. Should cost analysis. aPriori’s cost insights enable more informed negotiations, analyzing a greater percentage of the components you buy. And it helps quoting teams accelerate the quote process.
4. Strategy setting. Manufacturing is using aPriori for developing time standards, capital justification, and make versus buy decisions.
5. Sustainable Production. Taking cost and carbon out of products that are currently on the market.

These are all capabilities that are enabled by aPriori’s cost, manufacturability, and sustainability insights.

And we are proud to announce that in recognition of our continued innovation on the manufacturing insights platform, Frost & Sullivan awarded us their New Product Innovation Award. Frost & Sullivan cited that to drive new product innovation, a company must understand the market’s needs and deliver a solid solution with reliable performance. Frost & Sullivan found that aPriori embodies this concept.

In closing, now is the perfect time to lead critical initiatives that respond to today’s challenges of inflation, skills shortages, supply chain disruptions, and sustainability. And to drive innovation while optimizing cost and mitigating environmental impact at a faster pace than ever before requires the collaboration of all stakeholders in the manufacturing ecosystem.

All of you have a unique opportunity to drive change. Please take the opportunity to make profitability and sustainability a reality for a better world.