A digitally thinking India

June 18, 2019 2:12 pm

Launched with the motto “Power Empower”, Digital India’s vision is comprehensive of growth and development in the field of electronic services, manufacturing industries and job opportunities along with spreading digital literacy. Here, is an analysis on what the industry thinks about Digital India, making each and every citizen of India, digitally empowered, and transform the country itself into a knowledge driven economy.

Launched on the 1st of July, 2015, the Digital India campaign was said to be very innovative and a much needed amelioration, especially in today’s context, when everything is essentially getting ‘digitalised’. It aimsthrough digital means, by improving the online infrastructure and improving network connectivity. In simple terms, it aims at making the country empowered in the field of technology.The enterprises today are seeing an unprecedented rate of change – where the work, the worker and the economy is changing. The future of manufacturing is Industry 4.0 technologies such as automation that have multi-fold benefits with minimal investments.

Machine tools
Rajesh Nath, MD, VDMA India says, “Digital technology is making machine tools industry adopt Industry 4.0 and move into digital manufacturing from product design, engineering and execution to digital services.”By using Industry 4.0 technologies, companies can rise to the global challenges of increasing customer requirements and volatile market developments.The state of machines can be continuously captured and monitored from anywhere in the world. Thus, the conditions for predictive maintenance and services are created.

Upgradation of technologies and processes is a must to meet the global requirements and implement digitisation. So, these industries necessarily have to go for the latest technology designs. Muralishankar Sambasivam, President, AIFI says, “As an association, we are pushing the people to give some kind of technological upgradation funding to small scale industries. A lot of bigger companies have upgraded themselves with IIoT where condition monitoring, current monitoring is part of their process. For the SME/MSME to get that kind of technologies, a lot has to happen.”

Automation and going digital are terms that are yet to find its roots in India. After approaching clients to showcase automated machines, the general feedback was ‘why choose an automated machine when we have cheaper manual machines easily and cheaply available’. What the client does not realise is that If a machine runs constantly, the accuracy of the tool is much higher and if opted for the manual machines, the operator will influence the running quality of the machine.

Winfried Przybyl, Director-India & Russia, United Grinding Group Management AG, says, “If you have an automatic loading system on the machine, it will continue to run 24 hours a day. This will give you much higher quality and much higher efficiency out of your machine.” The price of a machine should be a secondary request and the customer should understand to get better performance machine with automatic loading system.

With government’s initiative of digital transformation and empowering citizens by developing infrastructure to provide affordable internet access to every Indian citizen and to possess digital identity, India is leapfrogging towards 4th Industrial Revolution. Digital India can be considered the first step towards the same. Jayant Joshi, Managing Director, RUJ & SRM Mechanics Pvt. Ltd says, “While manufacturing is encountering juggernauts like IIoT, government’s efforts to create IT awareness in machine tool industry seems to be lacking.”

Automation
Industry 4.0 and IIoT which are gradually making inroads could emerge as the game changer for Indian manufacturing; looking at the ever changing dynamics of the technology world. They can enable manufacturers to improve their productivity and quality manifold. Thus, helping them progress in the automation investment phase.Ajay Gurjar, Deputy COO & Head of Business Operations, Yaskawa India (Robotic Division) says, “Many of the Indian manufacturing companies have not yet invested extensively in the traditional automation. So, now they can make a smarter investment by adopting IIoT technologies.”

When the government is taking bold and modern steps, it is the duty of industry to cope-up with a change. You can’t be giving lame excuses. The industry must propel change by skilling our industry. ‘Digital India’ is ‘Future India’. UmeshMukkannavar, Managing Director, IDS Technologies India Pvt Ltd. says, “If well executed, Digital India will curb corruption, improve literacy, increase competencies and also help rural industries. If Digital India becomes a success, not only Tire 3 cities, but even towns will become industry friendly and India will move on to become a knowledge based society.”

Digital India have well prepared reforms in place based on global best practices; however, a periodic feedback, and review is essential for quick progress helping remove any identified bottlenecks in implementation. This enables manufacturing to keep up with fast-paced technology changes happening across the world.

The Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) segment plays significant role in the emergence of the Indian economy. According to reports, Indian MSME segment contributes nearly 45 per cent to manufacturing sector. Associated with such high growth rates, this segment is facing many problems such as increasing global competition, fund shortage, brownfield plans with low operational scales etc. Jhankar Dutta, Managing Director, B&R Industrial Automation Pvt. Ltd. says, “By adopting advanced automation and digitisation technologies in daily business, MSMEs can stay competitive and even gain differential advantage.”

However, there exists a gap between MSME’s aspiration of adopting technology and actual implementation. To bridge the existing gap, the government needs to develop more technology centres across India where MSMEs can get hands on experience in state-of-the-art technology.

Facility
The world is already moving towards digital media and we see more and more acceptance of digital media as it also brings the convenient factor. People are using digital medium for communication, transaction or all the economic related activities on digital platform.

KK Shetty, , CEO and MD, Citadel Intelligent Systems Ltd, “Digital is faster and highly efficient, and I see it growing in the coming years. With government introducing Jan DhanYojana, Aadhaar under Digital India initiative, which has seen more inflow of data transaction, there is a need of high bandwidth for smooth and seamless transition of these data and that can be managed only by optical fiber infrastructure.”

Digital has provided a very good platform for the HVAC industry in the form of new technologies like the IoT enabled remote sensing and real time monitoring of data and devices.Shashi Shekar, MD, Camfil Air Filteration India Pvt. Ltd says, “Digital India campaign has opened new ways of communications which are more specific and requirement based for the user which is a big advantage has opened new ways of communications which are more specific and requirement based for the user which is a big advantage for the HVAC industry.”

The optimum use of digitalisation in the Indian industry in terms of manufacturing is being just explored very recently.R. Srinivasan, Chairman, IIW Foundation says, “Going digital is a challenge faced not only by the welding industry but also all sectors of manufacturing. Primarily, I feel that the personnel who are involved in the manufacturing activity have limited access to digital controls. But, now, the Digital India initiative has given an opportunity for the people to look beyond traditional manufacturing practices.”
Industries are now open to adopt digitalisation, but the lack of infrastructure is becoming a hindrance. Large industrial houses should support smaller companies associated with them to adopt digitalisation.In order to make the digitalisation play an important role in the metal joining industries in our country the efforts to develop a strong knowledge sharing program to be devised at all levels is important.

Technology
Adoption is one thing, effective implementation and enhancement is another. Most MSMEs stop at the adoption stage, as it’s a minimal requirement of the nature of business. Lack of value visibility and lack of (helpful) data analytics within their manufacturing systems are some of the reasons for this shortcoming.

The MSME segment in the areas of manufacturing, IT and engineering have very high digital technology adoption rates, as this is a key differentiator. Having said so, I also do want to mention that this is a continual process and this is where most MSMEs fail to stay current, saysVineet Seth, Managing Director – South Asia & Middle East, Mastercam APAC.

Digital transformation of MSME
The adoption to the digital transformation is slow in MSME which is mostly because of the inappropriate understating of digital transformation and the benefits. It is also due to the lack of awareness of latest technology trends. Another hurdle for digitalisation at MSME is ‘mindset’, ROI which sometimes becomes difficult to predict within a time frame and awareness about digital transformation and the expectations out of this implementation.

Regardless the size of the organisation, Santosh Tatte, Country Manager, HMS Indiasays that digital transformation can offer benefits to all organisations and MSME should take this initiative to get benefited from digitalisation.”

New technologies have changed every aspect of the world we live in, and cannot think of a single sector or industry that has not benefitted from it. From software defined infrastructure and multi-cloud environments to digital workspaces and device management, Indian SMEs are keen to leverage all in their quest to push ahead. Apsom says, “Security remains the main concern for organisations across the board, and SMEs are rapidly moving away from a bolted-on approach to security, to more intrinsic strategies.” This is especially true of those organisations with a B2C business proposition. Modern customers are used to seamless on demand access and will not stick to a business that does not deliver just that. B2B enterprises cannot lag far behind either because competition is not far behind and digital transformation will mean improved profitability and revenues.

While new age companies are looking to strengthen their technology-based products and services, older and more traditional SMEs want to transform their legacy infrastructure to keep pace with increasing competition. In a world of agile tech-based companies, older companies must modernise and make the transition to be a software defined business if they want to retain their competitive edge.