Large companies in India are transforming their diverse businesses through smart factory initiatives. What does that mean? It means they are looking at real time manufacturing insights from their plants. Again, what does that mean? It means real time visibility into manufacturing operations and the right analysis of production line losses at every stage. Data is acquired through sensors installed at each stage of the assembly line and that throws up real time insights into online efficiencies.
Today, technology is very important to manufacturing. Among the technologies that are important to the process and hybrid industries are: digitalization because it triggers investments in many other areas from field devices, to MES, to IT/OT convergence, the digital twin which reduces engineering times and helps improve the performance and availability of installed assets.
Speaking about technologies on offer, Meenu Singhal, VP, industry business, Schneider Electric India, says, “Our whole focus is towards transforming industries in India through energy efficient and innovative solutions. This involves supporting automation and the manufacturing segment in improving productivity and efficiency. We do this through Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure that enables industries to create sustainable infrastructure to drive IIoT growth, by turning industrial automation into a profit engine. Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure is an IoT-enabled, plug-and-play, open architecture, that delivers end-to end solutions in six domains of expertise – power, IT, building, machine, plant and grid. Technological advancements, such as the Internet of Things, big data, and cloud computing, will transform everything within the industrial operation, from cyber security to supply chain. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) delivers a huge potential for automation and manufacturing companies. With AI and automation powered technologies, the manufacturers can improve efficiency, fasten processes, and even optimise operations by reducing production cost.”
Mid-size companies need to accelerate digital transformation initiatives to survive disruption. The major challenges a mid-size company faces for adopting new technology is around the workforce, time, and cost. To simplify this, they can take step by step approach. Run a pilot project on a small scale and look at the RoI before going all out. TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) audit is becoming a necessity for not just large companies, but for the SME segment too. The adoption of IIoT will help them in complying with the TPM audits.
Manish Misra, chief information officer, Panasonic India, says, “Our Industrial IoT (IIoT) platform helps manufacturers tap information from their machines on the shop floor and provide insights around availability, quality, and performance. It helps the manufacturers monitor the condition of machines across plants in real-time. This increase in visibility allows them to operate more machines with fewer resources, increasing uptime and production by more than 20% on average. Our solution also measures and analyses consumables such as power, water, and gas, which are critical for a manufacturing plant.”
The solution also addresses to eliminate paperwork on a shop floor by providing tablets to capture data digitally for quality inspection and production planning. AI and machine learning algorithms uncover data-driven insights to diagnose and predict problems. The company also offers solutions around the smart warehouse system, which helps tackle challenges such as space utilization, inventory oversight, and remove inefficiencies in the system.
Getting There
A major factor that everyone considers is identifying changing customer needs. Though one can focus more on delivering more value to the customers than the competition, but what if the customers’ values change? It is important to plan one’s strategy keeping the customer in mind. Continuous mapping of customers’ expectations, monitoring regular customer feedbacks is important for a growing business. Shandar Alam, MD, hydraulics and vehicle, Eaton, India, says, “When looking at large scale innovation, today, in the age of big data and IoT, digital connectivity is a key element that exists across the manufacturing floor, electric grid, buildings, healthcare facilities, transportation and in the home. We are continuously innovating intelligent power solutions that collect data, learn and provide actionable insights to optimise power use and continuity. We’re taking Industry 4.0 head-on by investing in our people and technologies to bring to market the digital innovations that positively impact your products, processes and bottom line.”
The company has a strong focus is to improve the quality of life and the environment by advancing power management. This keeps them dedicated to engineering connected products that power your home, office, facility, machine, airplane or vehicle today and well into the future. The electrical, aerospace, hydraulic and vehicle products and services live at the origin of data. And with that data, Eaton India helps its customers operate more efficiently than ever.
Aik Jin, Tan, vertical solutions lead, Zebra Technologies Asia Pacific, says, “Before IoT can be fully deployed for any enterprise, we must first identify the technological state that the company is currently in. For instance, if the company still using pen and paper to track its assets and inventory, then they should be laying the fundamentals like introducing barcodes and scanners to give its products, physical assets and people a digital voice. By doing so, the company will be able to gain real-time visibility, which in turn allows it to make business-critical decisions more swiftly.”
He suggests, that if the company is already got their basics covered, then it may want to adopt more advanced technology like Intelligent Edge Solutions (IES) as below, amongst others:
Zebra Workforce Connect – providing workers with the power of one device that enables them with enterprise data and applications, plus PTT calls, PBX calls and enterprise-class secure messaging.
Zebra VisibilityIQ – Enables a portfolio of tools to generate data-driven, actionable insights powered by Savanna, Zebra’s breakthrough data intelligence platform.
Zebra Savanna – a platform that aggregates and analyzes data from edge devices to reveal actionable workflow insights, to help companies make business-critical decisions.
In terms of putting processes in place before implementing IoT and predictive maintenance, K Arunagiri, business line manager, motor vehicle industry division, Atlas Copco India, says, “Prepare the mindset of the team involved in this process of shifting towards the benefits of IoT getting deployed on the shop floor. We have been providing providing support to customers what we call ‘Smart Connected Assembly “presentation to all key customers and will roll out the next edition of the same. Our team is prepared to drive this change into our customer’s premises and implement them successfully. Our all-round efforts in these initiatives would pave way for customers to choose the right approach in terms of a road map of choosing the right products and solutions linked with tangible benefits.”
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to predictive maintenance is making data flow smoothly from machines to ERP systems in order to achieve a high level of security and reliability with a low level of latency. Divay Kumar, CEO & MD, O4S, says, “Our MARK application integrates with manufacturing assembly lines on the last stage to imprint UID’s on the finished products. O4S uses IIoT to integrate with industrial printers, which print MRP, manufacturing batch details and expiry dates, to print unique QR codes that are generated by O4S’ cloud-based generator. The O4S system has a 2-way data exchange protocol setup with these printers. This enables us to track the ‘up-time’ of the assembly line in real-time. If ever there is a breakdown, the O4S system is the first to know about the same.”
Using these two data sets, the company is able to provide information needed by an organisation for scheduling preventive maintenance as well as respond to breakdown.
Making work productive
Most people believe that it is important to identify the priority areas of this need in the shop floor environment and the benefits linked to the same before deploying the same. There is also an important need to identify if the IT infrastructure across the organization are set up in an adequate way and IT is a key stakeholder in this process. Arunagiri says, “I believe it is important to first set up the back ground infrastructure in terms of the IT set up identifying the workload demand and planning enterprise servers for example if need be supplemented with good network at plant level as well. It is also important to bring in every important stakeholder in the shop floor understand the benefits of predictive maintenance and its benefits would provide them in the long term. The equipment that would be changed/ added to implement this would fall in place seamlessly if the above are taken care of.”
Manufacturers have plenty of reasons to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of equipment maintenance. Poor maintenance can reduce a plant’s productivity by 5-20%. Currently, manufacturers
use preventive maintenance or servicing equipment based on expected wear and tear to prevent breakdowns. They need to start adopting predictive maintenance, which is more efficient than preventive
maintenance as decisions & actions are based on real-time data to identify problems proactively. Through the use of machine learning and advanced analytics and AI, maintenance strategies can be developed that deploy maintenance resources only when sensors or monitors show signs of impending failure.
Misra says, “Everything in a manufacturing shop floor – people, assets, machines – is continuously moving, and the network must be able to move with its environment in order to be truly functional. The need for reliable connectivity is essential. The need for capacity on the network will continue to increase as more IoT devices join the network, and demand for data grows, hence scalability of the network is essential. Provide necessary education to the shop floor operators and the supervisor so that they can adopt these technologies in their day to day operations. Educate the operators to start capturing data consistently around quality details, downtime reasons using the paperless solution.”
Tan says with a finality, “To achieve predictive maintenance, the people, assets and goods of an enterprise need to be connected by first granting them all with a digital voice. By doing so, data can be consolidated and analysed by intelligent solutions like Zebra Savanna which turns it into actionable insights to help enterprises make business-critical decisions.”
