Boeing is a great example of Smart Manufacturing. They have increasingly outsourced "Components" to many different suppliers around the world. The suppliers are fully responsible for "components" that are fully tested and are somewhat stand-alone assemblies. Those suppliers are specialists in their own component assemblies and are now given the freedom to innovate within their own specialities.
There was a time Boeing used to define everything down to the last tolerance specificiation and it was a nightmare to coordinate tight tolerances very closely with suppliers or even internally making sure that everything is manufactured by Boeing according to how they thought they ought to be.
Seems like the global nature of manufacturing has forced Boeing to do it this way and install their own quality folks at the suppliers' locations instead to make sure that what they manufacture is acceptable to its own final assembly processes!
The same kind of "Smart Processes" are happening even as we speak. You order something with Dell or HP, a desktop or a PC, it is manufactured by one of many different suppliers around the globe, depending upon where it needs to be shipped. There are different third-party assemblers and shippers involved in the process and all integrated on the Internet, making information flow all around and goods and services flowing from them to the end customer.
Companies are even outsourcing their design and innovation processes to companies like Ideo.
This way, just as in Smart Manufacturing, Order Processing specialists process orders the best way they know how, manufacturing and assembling specialists do their best work with their experience, and customer support done by specialists here. This does not mean offshoring these for cheap labor. In fact, 90% of the world's outsourcing happens, even now, within the same country!
Smart Processes can lead the way in cutting waste by an order of magnitude in people, time and effort!
Seems like there is a new trend in the horizon and that too, for the right reasons.
The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process - Barbara Colorose
I'm not sure if Boeing is a good real world example for Smart Manufacturing bcs of the devasting delays of their latest aircraft - the 787 Dream Liner. The delays have taken a major toll on the stock price since last year before the stock market crash of '08. The reason for delays as Boeing puts it was “start-up issues in our factory and in our extended global supply-chain�.
I am sure that there will many real-world lessons learned and case studies from their project.
Theory vs. practice = details, details, details