The Lighthouse Operating System 2025

The ambition driving the Lighthouse Operating System (Lighthouse OS) initiative is to refresh, revise and even reinvent the global production systems of the past for the digital age – essentially, to create a gold-standard reference framework that serves as a problem-solving engine to drive improvement and performance, open- sourced and shared with the world. This framework has been built in collaboration with the World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse Network (GLN) to ensure that the resulting approach not only learns from industry leaders and their experiences but also supports a connected journey for manufacturers. The starting point is understanding where manufacturing is today and how it got there. At a high level, five drivers are shaping manufacturing: –Customer: To meet the rising demand for mass personalization and instant delivery, manufacturers must adapt. Customization has evolved from the selection of features to a situation in which products are often uniquely tailored to individual needs. This shift challenges manufacturers to handle greater flexibility in production while ensuring quality – often at lower volumes. –Supply chain: Managing increasingly complex supply chains requires resilience and real- time transparency. Supply-chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions, multiple information flows, resource constraints and global competition demand proactive steering to maintain efficiency and competitiveness across the end-to-end supply network. –People: Managing the growing complexity of human–machine interaction is essential. AI and robotics are reshaping human roles in real time, blurring the lines with more seamless interfaces, enhancing performance while making work safer, more effective and innovation-driven, keeping work business-focused while also meaningful and satisfying. –Planet: Sustainability is no longer optional; manufacturers must balance efficiency with environmental responsibility. Modern social and environmental pressures demand action on climate change and resource scarcity. Achieving true sustainability requires a complete redesign of the business model – from design to production, use and reuse. –Technology: The four business themes above look to technology to unlock the hidden potential. Harnessing digital solutions and data can drive and accelerate progress in everything, from improving operational productivity on the shop floor to achieving an overall competitive advantage throughout the end-to-end business. For decades, manufacturers have relied on established methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints to drive continuous improvement. These approaches are epitomized for many through the powerful Toyota Production System, where “flows in a Toyota factory are rigidly scripted, yet at the same time Toyota’s operations are enormously flexible and adaptable”.2 While this insight dates back to the late 1990s – and other foundational management approaches go back even further – the core principles remain relevant. Continuous improvement is still rooted in structured, scientific experimentation, challenging the status quo by continually refining standards. Today, digital and data unlock new levels of flexibility and agility while maintaining control over quality and delivery. The complication is that the emerging technologies can appear highly conceptual, and the improvement methodologies are not especially well designed to capture that digital opportunity. Therefore, the key question is, how can an industrial operating system be designed that can act as a reference framework for industrial companies to drive improvement, integrating the best of the production system with the best of the digital IT/OT system under a single platform? As today’s digital technology opens the opportunity for a truly synchronized and seamless end-to-end execution of industrial operations, a new, first-of- its-kind approach to operations is needed, one that connects the siloed approaches of the past. The new approach must capture the granularity of the production process through use cases while seamlessly connecting them into a holistic, end- to-end framework enabling the better steering and balancing of the overall system. Achieving this high ambition will likely require more than incremental evolution. It demands a step change in thinking – a current-forward, future- back approach.1.1 Building on traditional improvement methodologies The Lighthouse Operating System: Driving Responsible Transformation 6