Smart Factory & Indian Manufacturing

December 1, 2020 5:06 pm

An in-depth analysis on how ‘smart factory’ will enable Indian manufacturers to compete in the future.

The smart factory with the convergence of the digital and physical worlds – represents a leap forward from more traditional automation to a fully connected and flexible system. A complete transformation of the supply chain has become possible by using a constant stream of data from connected operations and production systems. Here, industry experts have shares their thoughts on how smart factory will enable Indian manufacturers to compete in the future. They have shared their thoughts about how smart factories can help India become a global manufacturing hub.

How ‘smart factory’ will enable Indian manufacturers to compete in the future?
Ninad Deshpande, Head – Marketing and Open Technologies Specialist, B&R Industrial Automation, Ideally ‘smart factory’ is a blend of traditional manufacturing processes and digital technologies like advanced automation, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud computing, 3D printing, robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), enhanced machine-to-machine (M2M) communication among many others. Smart factories offer real time aspects of application and performance across production line and supply chain offering flexible, adaptive, and proactive production. While India is expected to be one of the world’s largest manufacturing countries in coming years, our Indian manufacturing sector is witnessing intense competition. Indian OEMs and end users are looking to optimize resources and reduce costs, by actively focusing on adopting advanced technologies. The current pandemic situation is transforming the way we live, work and communicate. To fit into this situation, Indian manufacturers need to focus on new age technologies across value chain to bring paradigm shift which will transform manufacturing process. These technologies are not only for manufacturing but also for supply chain, post processing and after sales.

In my opinion, the requirement of digitization will bring in a new wave for the need for implementation of smart factories. With reference to various reports, with the deployment of smart manufacturing techniques the manufacturing costs and conversion costs reduce by 20 percent and 40 percent respectively. These numbers say it all and smart manufacturing techniques are likely to be the new industry normal for Indian manufacturers across sectors. These transformational changes, however, need to be accompanied with right automation partner so they can offer more appropriate solution and technologies to manufacturers. B&R knows the challenges faced by Indian manufacturing sector and provides correct solutions for tomorrow’s needs resulting in significant competitive edge in the area of smart manufacturing and production effectiveness. B&R provides solutions for tomorrow’s needs resulting in significant competitive edge in the area of smart manufacturing and production effectiveness. Our innovative products, solutions and trust in open source technologies such as OPC UA, OPC UA over TSN, POWERLINK, openSAFETY – together with our exceptional support and partnership – keep our customers ahead of the competition as innovation leaders in their markets. We help our customers build next-generation machines and factories, thus, becoming Industry 4.0 ready.

Sunil Motwani, Country Manager, MathWorks India, Today, India is helping define a roadmap that would yield more profits by adopting the latest technologies in the manufacturing industry. Smart factory or Industry 4.0 will see production lines that rely heavily on AI for health monitoring and predictive maintenance services, visual inspection systems, and optimization of manufacturing processes.

AI will lead the way to a fully automated factory that flexibly manufactures goods in small batches – all the way to “sample size one” production. We will see more and more AI-enabled applications that are technologically interesting and economically relevant. And eventually, AI will allow for flexible and powerful machine software that would not have been possible with standard ways of programming.

Ashish Srivastava, Plant Manager – Manesar, Continental Automotive India, I would like to highlight the difference between a ‘smart factory’ and a ‘traditional’ factory. In traditional factories, most monitoring and control of machinery heavily rely on manual interventions for final decision making. A manual command must be initiated for the machines to act, which may lead to errors and slow production. In contrast, smart factories are much independent and take a holistic approach to production. Smart factories automate the entire value-chain process, including manufacturing, supply chain, and quality systems. Machines used in smart factories for manufacturing are capable of AI compatibility, and they can be developed and modified according to the needs and latest manufacturing trends.

The transition to smart factories will gradually limit the human role in monitoring and repetitive tasks. It enables more informed decision-making, which eventually will lead to lesser error and faster outputs. It is also possible for smart factories to take some corrective measures without much human intervention through predictive analytics and machine learning, which improves the efficiency and quality of the production. Industries such as automotive, electronics, and healthcare are among the early adopters of smart factories, and they are vastly benefitting from this transformation.

Sunil, please discuss the most advanced smart factory trends.
Sunil said,  Our work with large and small customers worldwide and in India has included discussions around these smart factory trends:
• Robots and autonomous systems automating production and material handling
• While classic programming and teaching of robots is not suitable for preparing the system to handle the huge and fast-growing number of different goods, future handling equipment will automatically learn through reinforcement learning and other AI techniques. The prerequisites – massive calculation power and huge amounts of data – have been established over the past years.
• Machine functionality being validated in the digital world: The growing complexity of machine software and the ongoing modularization of modern production equipment have led to more and more simulation upfront. The factory of the future will be built twice – first virtually, then physically. Digital representations of production machines continuously fed with live data from the field will be used for health monitoring throughout the equipment’s entire lifetime. They will eventually make onsite missions be an exception.
• The further fusion of shop floor and office floor-With modularized machines interconnected through standardized protocols like OPC UA TSN and fixed cable connections being replaced with wireless protocols like 5G, we will also see a transformation on the office floor. Programs running on industrial controllers, edge devices, and cloud systems will work even more tightly with apps and dashboards and eventually lead to a fusion of the shop floor and the office floor.

Mr. Ashish, how are you adopting the ‘smart factory’ concept in your facility?
Ashish Srivastava: Smart factories for us are like a step up from traditional automation to a fully connected and flexible manufacturing system. Continental strongly believes in using smart & automated services – be it in the products we manufacture or in-house processes. We have implemented smart factory initiatives across the globe, including India.

In India, we have implemented Augmented Reality (AR) for remote assistance and problem-solving, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) for material movement on the shop floor, Artificial Intelligence (AI) for facial detection of quality inspectors. We have also deployed Cobots to undertake repetitive tasks. Automatic optical inspection and visual inspection are helping us in supplying better quality products in the market. We are also working on newer ideas like E Kanban, E-Jidoka, etc. A low-cost automation concept called Chaku-Chaku has also been adopted to improve our production lines’ efficiency.

Could you discuss the benefits you have received by implementing ‘smart factory’?
Ashish Srivastava: The transformation towards smart factories has helped us produce optimised outputs in terms of quality or costs. For instance, the robotic arms and Cobots undertake repetitive mechanical tasks, thus increasing our outputs. AGV restricts unnecessary movement on the shopfloor, allowing employees to focus more on skilled tasks.

Furthermore, connectivity, AI/ML have helped in making Continental’s supply chain smarter. Automatic replenishment, big data analytics, TOMS (Transport Order Management Systems), GPS-enabled vehicles in outbound logistics across all our plants, Continental Cloud services, etc., have helped us make our SCM processes more efficient.

Smart factories can handle the agile nature of operational tasks, resulting in maximum flexibility. Also, advanced sensors technology can automatically recognize manufacturing demand fluctuations, which, in turn, allows a company’s supply chain to respond with better agility. Another aspect of implementing smart factories is to promote sustainability practices. With the help of digitalization, we were able to implement various sustainability initiatives. If we take a simple example, checklists’ digitalization in the utility area at our Bangalore plant reduced paper waste tremendously.

How smart factories can help India become a global manufacturing hub?
Sunil Motwani: India can become a global manufacturing hub by capitalizing on two key trends that we are currently seeing in the country. The first is the rise of digital transformation, where successful companies will have adopted a pragmatic digital transformation approach. Here, data and models—and the engineering teams’ associated skills in developing analytics, models, and simulations—are applied systematically to workflows throughout the life cycle of the product or service. The systematic use of data can start with analytics developed specifically to get insights from experimental and research data. But it also means scaling and extending those analytics to huge, heterogeneous sets of live and archived data, acquired from manufacturing, maintenance records, and other business processes, to enable data-driven decisions during research and design and in production, operations, and maintenance.

The second is creating a future-ready workforce. Companies that can navigate this more digital and virtual world will do so with teams of engineers with “domain+” skills. This means engineers who can combine domain knowledge with expertise in technology and tools like MATLAB and Simulink. As a result, companies building and operating industrial equipment will hire engineers with a completely different profile to be ready for a future in which Industry 4.0 is just the beginning.

Ninad Deshpande: For machine builders and manufacturing facilities, digitalization is no longer a choice, but a necessity. Global trends like Industry 4.0, Industrial IoT and digitalization finally leading to smart manufacturing are already proving their benefits in real-world applications. India’s machine builders and manufacturers are evaluating technologies and solutions and mapping their paths to implementation for which B&R is highly appreciated by machine builders and manufacturers. B&R provides solutions for tomorrow’s needs resulting in significant competitive edge in the area of smart manufacturing and production effectiveness. B&R is already propelling its customers today ahead of the competition with next-generation automation solutions.

Even as technologies change, the objectives at machine level and line level remain the same. We seek higher throughput, less downtime, lower energy consumption and higher product quality. In addition, further improvement is needed in ensuring the safety of human operators and reducing pollution and wastage. The journey to smart manufacturing sets out to achieve all of these objectives by applying the latest developments in open communication along with ever-increasing intelligence in the sensors, actuators and automation systems.

Factories are looking at ways to gather data from machines as well as lines and send it to IT systems for analytics. With intelligence becoming more and more decentralised and a growing volume and variety of machine and line data becoming available for analytics, the need for edge computing is on the rise. Edge architectures help collect data from sensors, actuators, machines, lines and plants and move it to IT systems for analytics and long-term storage.

Ashish Srivastava: Industry 4.0 practices are the only way forward for manufacturers to compete in the global manufacturing industry. Manufacturers need to invest in technologies like cloud computing, IoT, advanced sensor technologies, 3D printing, industrial robotics, data analytics, AI, ML, enhanced machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, etc.

Smart factories help in making the right decisions daily with faster and efficient production. It can be capital-intensive and may require a lot of effort at the beginning. However, if the technologies are adopted at an early stage, it can surely help manufacturers achieve optimized goals and ultimately help India become a global manufacturing hub.

Sameer Mudhalwadkar, Sales Director – SAARC and Middle East, Red Lion Controls: There are a lot of things to do to mitigate the efficiency gaps or process gaps. Having said that, if we see the current government’s focus, they have already identified sector-wise areas where we really want to be Aatmanirbhar (self-reliant). For example, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, automotive, or even food & beverage industry. The kind of investments that are coming into food parks and the cold storages would certainly give a lot of traction to the agriculture and allied industries as well as to the manufacturing of food & beverage industry. I believe that in another 3-5 years time, we will start seeing results of this. At the same time, in a parallel manner, the manufacturers have to work on adaptation of the smart manufacturing concepts to make their process more efficient and productive.

Sameer Gandhi, Managing Director, OMRON Automation, India: If we have to be a part of the global manufacturing ecosystem and plug into the global supply chain, the three things that we need – competitiveness, quality, and reliability. The competitiveness will come from scale and productivity whereas the products and their all components have to be of high quality to meet global standards. And in terms reliability, when we say we will deliver, we have to deliver what we promised or even better than that. If we have to achieve all these aspects, we must have smart manufacturing. We cannot do it in a traditional or manual way. So we must have smart manufacturing to really propel the Indian manufacturing to be a part of global supply chain and then eventually make India a global manufacturing hub.

I think adoption of smart factories should be our prime goal. That’s the only way we’re going to have a much larger manufacturing footprint which in turn can ramp up employability or employment opportunities in the country. The industry is already taking the lead in this movement and of course the government policies are being formulated accordingly.

Subrata Karmakar, President of Robotics and Discrete Automation business, ABB India: I am looking forward to an intelligent market in India with intelligent people and intelligent system. To make it happen, we have to create awareness within the ecosystem. We have to move ahead level by level. I’m sure that coming generations will take it forward and will make India a global manufacturing hub.

I am looking forward to an intelligent market in India with intelligent people and intelligent system. To make it happen, we have to create awareness within the ecosystem. We have to move ahead level by level. I’m sure that coming generations will take it forward and will make India a global manufacturing hub.
Subrata Karmakar, President of Robotics and Discrete Automation business, ABB India

If we have to be a part of the global manufacturing ecosystem and plug into the global supply chain, the three things that we need – competitiveness, quality, and reliability.
Sameer Gandhi, Managing Director, OMRON Automation, India

The manufacturers have to work on adaptation of the smart manufacturing concepts to make their process more efficient and productive.
Sameer Mudhalwadkar, Sales Director – SAARC and Middle East, Red Lion Controls

The requirement of digitization will bring in a new wave for the need for implementation of smart factories.
Ninad Deshpande, Head – Marketing and Open Technologies Specialist, B&R Industrial Automation

AI will lead the way to a fully automated factory that flexibly manufactures goods in small batches – all the way to “sample size one” production.
Sunil Motwani, Country Manager, MathWorks India

Smart factories can handle the agile nature of operational tasks, resulting in maximum flexibility.
Ashish Srivastava, Plant Manager – Manesar, Continental Automotive India