Not everything is what it appears to be on the surface. A sports car may have stunning lines and exotic accents, but you’re always going to want to check under the hood and make sure that make/model isn’t known to be parked at the shop all the time. Curb appeal is fine and good if you’re looking for a house, but what if that beaut is smack dab in the middle of the roughest part of town? Even in matters of the heart, physical allure sometimes hides a demon within.

The same holds true in manufacturing. One day, operations are humming along, business is prospering, and all is good. The next, the worst public healthcare crisis in a hundred years throws the entire world, and your operation, through a loop. In one foul swoop, you are grappling with shortfalls in materials, demand, and labor, not to mention every other additional human fear that comes along with it. And that’s just it, the pandemic provided proof of concept of every worst-case scenario throughout the supply chain that we could have imagined. It demonstrated that below the surface of prosperous times, there is a real-world need for smart manufacturing to flush out root-level problems to not only curb disaster through greater efficiencies, but also ensure product quality that meets intensely high consumer demands.