Empowering entrepreneurship with enhanced technologies

January 2, 2021 4:44 pm

Talking about digitisation and democratisation of automation Sameer Mudhalwadkar, Sales Director – SAARC and Middle East, Red Lion Controls, feels that democratisation of automation will leverage the various sectors to make most possible use of technologies in their process. And with Make in India, this will create more entrepreneurship opportunities in India.

 Government aims to increase the share of the manufacturing sector to the country’s GDP to 25 percent by 2025. How can the process control and industrial automation sector contribute to the same?

Continuous automation of process and manufacturing technology in growth driven industries such as Automotive, Energy sector, Heavy industries, Pharma and Consumer shall assist in increasing the share of manufacturing to 25 percent by 2025. Costs in manual manufacturing will be reduced to ensure that India remains to be exponentially competitive in the global market; and higher productivity can be ensured only with improved and efficient process flows. Data transparency is another significant aspect to enhance production efficiency and operational improvements in multiple industries. Advancement in IoT solutions and in the implementation of Industry 4.0 application plays particularly an important role here.

With increased reliance on digitisation, which automated technologies have emerged enormously in driving your growth?

Our new Intelligent Edge Automation platform FlexEdge™ brings industrial data together as never before to transform edge computing. FlexEdge provides a scalable solution to integrate complex multi-vendor environments into digital transformation strategies, while providing a futureproof solution for changing application needs.

Companies evade expensive and complex rip-and-replace scenarios by leveraging the FlexEdge sled architecture, designed to enable organisations to power new communications technologies as they become available. FlexEdge is built with advanced networking capabilities at the core, providing powerful and secure networking to any industrial application is easy. Powered by Crimson® 3.2, FlexEdge enables connectivity to virtually anything in your system with point-and-click simplicity. And the new equipment working with the existing infrastructure means capital budgets are always considered. The FlexEdge form factor adapts as application needs change; effortlessly scale by adding up to ten hot-swappable I/O or PID modules. On-device wiring diagrams and removable wire clamp screw terminal blocks easy installation, while the at-a-glance module status indicator and individual channel LEDs improve troubleshooting and system testing.

Select the right FlexEdge software functionality for the application. Select from networking gateway, protocol gateway, advanced IIoT gateway, or an automation controller with IEC 61131 capabilities. If the application changes, simply upgrade the gateway to meet the applications requirements, it’s that easy. Reduce or eliminate costly equipment changes as simply as pushing new software. The rugged construction, a wide operating temperature range, industrial certifications and Red Lion’s Crimson® software provide a dependable solution for control, networking and data visualization in even the harshest environments.

Automated technologies are widely adopted by almost every industry, including MSMEs and do you see democratisation of automation as a reality in the near future?

Democratisation of automation is the process of making automation technology more accessible to more people and industries. For India to increase share of manufacturing in GDP to 25 percent by 2025 all the industrial sectors, especially the MSMEs need to adopt automation and automated technology for reducing losses and improve operational efficiency.

Automation is used everywhere in our day to day life. One of the best examples of democratisation of Automation is that farmers are also using automation system for farming purpose. Utilisation of water is automated and used as per requirement in the field. Hence it depicts that democratisation of automation as a reality in the near future.

Under the ‘Make in India’ initiative, can India become a ‘plus one’ destination by cutting down its dependency on imports?

‘Make in India’ initiative is helping to give boost to entrepreneurship in India and also bringing lot of investments in all sectors. There is lot of focus and investment from government side in all sectors to reduce dependence on other countries for various products/ raw material imports. The GoI incentive linked policies in various sectors shall help India reduce imports, manufacture many products locally and become truly “Atmanirbhar Bharat”.

Apart from automation and IoT, what can be the next big thing in transforming the industrial automation and process control category?

The Power of the Edge applications and components will influence and take automation technology to the next level. The merging of OT and IT generated data from different locations is an important future factor. The operational level is synchronized with the IT level in order to track, visualize and control the production process all the way to the company headquarters.

What new products should we look forward to from Red Lions in the coming years, for industrial automation and process control?

An expanded range of networking & automation technologies, starting with our new Profinet Ethernet Switch series, new range of RTU, enhanced Flex Edge Automation products as well as scalable programming tools for autonomous implementation of automation levels are the latest offerings from Red Lion Controls. In 2021, another highlight of new graphical data visualization will be introduced to the market. Processes controlled by several different components are more and more combined in compact devices.