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Monday, October 14, 2024

The 5 Pillars of Composability

I am seeing the industry converge on the term Composability to identify and explain the application of digital technologies that can effectively foster digital transformation. For digital transformation to happen, agility, flexibility, and human-centricity are a vital component that increase productivity in operations - the expected outcome. This is where the concept of composability emerges as the collective transformative paradigm. Let's also make it clear that the opposite of composable is monolithic and contrary to monolithic systems, Composable solutions empower manufacturers to adapt quickly, focus on the needs of their operators, and drive continuous improvement. 

Composable solutions are a critical ingredient in digital transformation because they empower manufacturers to enhance productivity by embracing flexibility, agility, and human-centric design. By focusing on the needs of operators and utilizing real-time data, digital tools enable rapid adaptation to changing conditions, boosting efficiency. This approach accelerates time-to-value, enhances collaboration, and supports sustained operational excellence, ultimately leading to higher productivity​.

The Composability Model for Digital Transformation

Let’s dive into the five key pillars that make composability such a powerful approach: Bottom-Up, Agility, Democratization, Human-Centric, and Compliance.

1. Bottom-Up: Building from the Ground Up

In contrast to the rigid, top-down structure of monolithic solutions, composable systems thrive on a bottom-up approach. This allows organizations to build solutions that are tailored to specific processes, activities, and operations. Composability starts at the operational level, focusing on solving problems at the frontline, rather than imposing broad, generic solutions from the top.

By empowering frontline operators and citizen developers to build apps that address their unique challenges, organizations can capture granular data about each activity. This leads to faster problem-solving, more efficient processes, and solutions that are adaptable to rapid changes​. The bottom-up approach is essential for increasing productivity and maintaining agility in a constantly evolving operational environment.

An interesting phenomena is that the bottom-up approach fosters an emergent design, where solutions are built iteratively, from the operational level up. This means frontline workers, who are closest to the challenges, contribute to the system’s development. By decentralizing control, emergent designs allows for rapid adjustments and iterations, ensuring that solutions evolve in real-time, in response to actual needs. This approach significantly reduces the time-to-value, as it enables immediate deployment and incremental improvements, accelerating innovation and aligning solutions with real-world demands​

2. Agility: Embracing Change through Lean and Continuous Improvement

Agility in composable solutions is crucial because it inherently supports Lean principles, which emphasize continuous improvement, waste reduction, and efficiency. Composability takes Lean further by bringing in adoption of digital technologies as a key enablers. Its the reunion of Lean and Agile, allowing for rapid cycles of innovation, quick iterations, and on-demand changes, which are essential for staying responsive in fast-paced environments.

In manufacturing, continuous improvement is key and agility is non-negotiable. Composable solutions, by design, are highly adaptable and enable organizations to iterate quickly. Unlike monolithic systems that lock you into predefined processes, composable systems allow for short test-fail-learn cycles that drive faster innovation. This agility extends to everything from software updates to operational adjustments, ensuring that you can stay ahead of challenges and capitalize on new opportunities. Agility also allows for faster implementation and a reduced time-to-value, meaning that benefits can be realized almost immediately after deployment​.

Augmented Lean represents this evolution of Lean, where digital tools and real-time data empower frontline workers to make immediate, informed decisions, maximizing efficiency and productivity in ways traditional Lean couldn’t achieve.

3. Democratization: Empowering Citizen Developers

The democratization of technology is another cornerstone of composability. This is where no-code and low-code platforms come in, they enable citizen developers - the people close to the operations, such as engineers, technicians, or operators - to create, modify, and maintain apps without needing deep IT or coding expertise.

This critically reduces dependency on a software skills, centralized IT and specialized OT departments - it speeds up the development of solutions that directly address operational challenges. As more people within the organization are empowered to contribute to solution development, it fosters a culture of innovation, encourages experimentation, and accelerates digital transformation​.

Democratization in composable solutions means empowering the people who know the process best, frontline workers and engineers, to create content. When those closest to the operations develop solutions, the results are more accurate, relevant, and effective. This drastically reduces development time because it eliminates communication gaps between IT and operations. With a no-code platform, these citizen developers can quickly build, test, and deploy apps that meet specific operational needs, accelerating time-to-value and promoting continuous innovation​

4. Human-Centric: Augmenting Human Capabilities

In a composable system, technology is designed to serve operators, rather than the other way around. In traditional monolithic systems, operators must conform to rigid workflows dictated by the system, limiting their ability to adapt and innovate. With composable solutions, however, operators are empowered by tools that assist them in performing tasks more efficiently, providing real-time insights, and reducing manual effort. This human-centric approach leverages the unique skills of workers, driving productivity increases by augmenting human decision-making and capabilities​

Therefore composability at its core is human-centric. It is built around augmenting human activity rather than replacing them, automating processes where it makes sense but still including them, ie "human in the loop". In a composable system, the technology is there to serve the operator, providing tools that digitize manual tasks, streamline workflows, and offer real-time data insights.

This focus on human-centric apps leads to more intuitive user experiences, reduced error rates, and improved operator efficiency. By connecting operators with their environment through digital tools, sensors, and IIoT devices, composable systems elevate the performance of the workforce, ensuring that technology acts as a productivity enabler.

5. Compliance: Built-In Validation

In the regulated industries, such as life sciences among others, compliance is a critical pillar and probably needs a deeper dive in a future blog post. Composable solutions, especially frontline operations platforms, must be designed with compliance in mind. They have to allow organizations to build and validate solutions iteratively while maintaining compliance. Digital data has to be captured and available to document all the required aspects such as: version control, audit trails, and automated validation processes.

With compliance built into the system from the ground up, organizations can ensure that their solutions are always aligned with regulatory requirements without stalling innovation. Continuous improvements and app iterations can be made seamlessly while keeping operations compliant​ with automatically captured digital data as evidence. 

Validation 4.0 is an essential component of composable solutions and is part of the Pharma 4.0 operational model. It applies a risk-based approach to testing, ensuring that apps are validated for their intended use without lengthy delays. This iterative process allows for continuous updates and improvements while maintaining compliance. Validation 4.0 integrates seamlessly into the digital transformation, supporting rapid deployment and constant change, enabling businesses to innovate faster without compromising regulatory standards. This agility is critical for modern operations to thrive in evolving environments​.

In Summary

Composable solutions represent a fundamental shift in how manufacturing operations are structured and executed. By embracing the principles of Bottom-Up, Agility, Democratization, Human-Centricity, and Compliance, organizations can achieve faster time-to-value, greater productivity, and enhanced operational flexibility. The future of manufacturing lies in building systems that are as dynamic and adaptable as the challenges they address.

Composability as defined here and if applied correctly can give your manufacturing operations a massive jump on your digital transformation. Interestingly it can also serve to sift through the hype and ambiguity in the different so called "digital" technologies. By simply asking the technology vendors how the implement and satisfy the 5 pillars you can effectively qualify any technology as being in or our of the new paradigm. Remember clear objectives and strategy are still the most crucial part of your digital strategy. These objectives have to clearly define how productivity is increased in your operation and clarity around the composability drivers is an excellent strategy.

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