A Lighthouse is a template, not a trophy

When our Suzhou factory entered the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network, the photographs were good and the press release was better. Neither is why the programme was worth doing.

The reason it was worth doing is that thirteen further sites used Suzhou as their benchmark. A Lighthouse that nobody copies is an expensive lamp.

Build the copy while you build the showcase

The temptation in a flagship programme is to make the flagship perfect. Custom integrations, a hero dashboard, a team of specialists who know every quirk of the line. It looks wonderful and it cannot be repeated, because the next site does not have that team.

In Project Phoenix we made a different trade. The data fabric that connected SAP S/4HANA, IIoT, MES, digital twins and real-time analytics across 45+ production lines was designed as a template from day one. That meant:

• Standard interfaces before clever ones.
• Documentation written for the second site, not the first.
• Governance (data residency, cross-border transfer, cloud deployment under CSL, DSL and PIPL) packaged in the China Digital Playbook, so the next team did not have to rediscover it.

The results at Suzhou were real: +32% OEE and about US$2.8M a year in savings. But the number I care about is the one that does not show up in Suzhou’s accounts. It shows up in everyone else’s.

The test

If you are running a flagship programme, ask one question every month: if we stopped tomorrow, what could another site pick up and use next quarter?

If the answer is “a case study”, you are building a trophy.