Smart manufacturing is driving a transformative wave across industries, revolutionising traditional business operations. By embracing advanced technologies and digitalisation, companies are experiencing unprecedented levels of efficiency, productivity, and sustainable growth. SKF India, a global manufacturing leader, stands at the forefront of this revolution. Through strategic investments, process optimisation, and workforce development, SKF India has harnessed the power of smart manufacturing, propelling its operations to new heights.
Can you discuss how smart manufacturing has benefited businesses in terms of increased efficiency and productivity?
Industries are quickly adopting new technologies and digitalisation of their processes to increase productivity and achieve sustainable growth. Businesses can hugely benefit from smart manufacturing, as automation of processes reduces human error, labour costs, accidents, and increases productivity, efficiency of plants, and reliability of manufactured products. Additionally, smart manufacturing also helps reduce production costs and time-to-market by optimising the workforce and the supply chain to utilise idle capacity within a factory. Smart manufacturing also helps manufacturers remain operational for longer by improving machine health and performance. Using technologies like AI-based Vision Inspection, condition monitoring of machines, predictive maintenance, etc., manufacturers can detect failures early, prevent plant shutdown, and minimise losses.
What are some challenges that companies face in adopting smart manufacturing practices, and how can they overcome them?
Today’s rapidly changing market requires companies to evolve and adapt to digital transformation. However, the industry is still defining exactly what digital manufacturing means. For us, a smart factory is not about deploying one software across the entire shop floor and seeing immediate improvements in the production process. It is the combination of various Industry 4.0 technologies that contributes to the optimisation of smart manufacturing. Furthermore, smart factories require a workforce with ‘Digital dexterity’ – a smooth transition to digitalisation requires workers that understand both the manufacturing processes and the digital tools that support these processes.
Another major hurdle faced by companies is aligning digitalisation with their growth strategy. While many companies aspire to embrace digitalisation, they often lack a well-defined strategy. This can impede progress and result in failure of digitisation initiatives. For instance, for SKG globally, one of the key strategic growth enablers is to digitalise the full value chain to make SKF easier to do business with and to enable SKF to make more intelligent decisions in its own operations. Therefore, it is crucial to align business objectives and establish clear KPIs to effectively measure success. Smart manufacturing also necessitates a significant cultural transformation. Businesses must plan for the future of their workforce and how they will adapt to the changing digital landscape. It also involves carefully considering concerns surrounding data and privacy, ownership, and process management.
While smart manufacturing has its challenges, companies can reap dividends with a carefully thought-out process, aligned with growth objectives, and with the help of an educated and informed workforce. The good thing is that SKF is taking the lead as part of our Future Factory initiative. By focusing on empowerment of the digital workforce and giving them the tools to have better analytics, better visibility into performance, and the ability to use that for quicker decision making, we are putting into practice the vision of a reliable, lean, clean, and digital value chain to accelerate world-class manufacturing.
Can you give us a closer look at SKF India’s experience with digital transition and how it has impacted the company’s operations and performance?
Globally, SKF has been on a journey to digitally transform the company’s backbone through harnessing the power of technology, interconnecting processes, streamlining operations, and delivering industry-leading digital products and services for customers. In SKF India, we started the Future Factory initiative two years ago and included it in our manufacturing strategy based on LGD – Lean, Green, Digital factories. Today, our digitization initiatives are aligned with our intelligent and clean growth strategy to accelerate world-class manufacturing. Given that speed, reliability, and low cost are critical as is the need to support vital production systems, this focus on digitalisation has allowed us to innovate with the insight and speed necessary to remain competitive.
To enhance operational efficiency, product quality, and customer satisfaction, we have invested in digital technologies such as IoT, Data Analytics, and Cloud computing. Implementing data analytics and predictive maintenance tools to monitor our production processes and equipment in real time has been key in our digitalisation journey. Within our manufacturing footprint, we are utilising sensors, robotics, and SCADA systems, along with upgrading machine control systems to the latest PLC with advanced features. Recently, ABB and SKF Group have entered into an agreement to explore the possibilities for a collaboration in the automation of manufacturing processes. Through the partnership, ABB and SKF will identify and evaluate solutions to improve manufacturing capabilities and support clients’ increased production efficiency. As a first step, SKF’s investments in automation and clean manufacturing processes will act as a testbed, focused on decreasing CO2 emissions from SKF’s operations. Longer-term, the parties intend to explore new business opportunities in both traditional and new market segments, where both companies bring experiences within a wide range of industries.
The path forward for SKF is to continue increasing the automation of our production facilities in all our regions, in order to stay ahead of our competition and improve our environmental performance. We are confident that with our talent mix, existing engineering and technology capabilities, and a growth and innovation mindset, we will be successful in transitioning to smart manufacturing practices and set industry benchmarks for factories of the future.
How has the concept of modern manufacturing evolved over the years?
Everything we consume or buy, at some point, comes in contact with some sort of automated process. Whether it is in the factory or at the transportation stage, our mobile phones, yoghourts, clothes, and newspapers have all been carried from one place to another by powerful, intelligent, and often networked conveyor systems.
Industrial automation originates from the industrial revolution when assembly lines were developed to manufacture products. Since then, the landscape of modern manufacturing has undergone a profound shift due to automation and digitalisation of processes. Industrial automation has progressively grown into a complex field in which computers, sensors, networks, and ethernets have progressively entered to control and monitor production.
A combination of aspects such as changing market demands, customer preferences, regulatory landscape, investments in research and development, and the advent of new technologies such as 5G and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are enabling factories to seamlessly create a network of wirelessly connected machines and people that can instantaneously collect, analyse, and distribute real-time data. Given the advantages associated with automation, such as increased efficiency and reliability of products and solutions, manufacturers are continuing to focus on upskilling their workforce to adapt and work with new technologies. By leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, and big data, manufacturers are creating plants that are more flexible, efficient, and responsive to customer and market demands. Looking ahead, manufacturing processes will continue to evolve with time. It is important that manufacturers remain committed to customer demands and assess changing market dynamics to evolve with emerging technologies and remain competitive.
In your opinion, what do you think the future of smart manufacturing looks like, and how will SKF India continue to be a leader in this field?
Technology is evolving extremely fast. We see new systems and processes replacing legacy practices in no time. We strongly believe that smart factories that utilise IIoT are an integral part of tomorrow’s intelligent infrastructure, offering an effective platform for future opportunities. This is because IIoT enables data analytics, machine-to-machine communication, and process automation to boost overall efficiency, launching a new era of market opportunities and economic growth.
Looking ahead, the new and emerging technologies coupled with the growing demand for sustainable products and solutions will continue to drive change. Processes will become more efficient, equipment will be cleaner and intelligent, and products will be more reliable and sustainable. To ride this change, it will be extremely important for manufacturers to invest in their people and develop their skills.
As a global organisation, we are leveraging technology to improve our processes, create products and solutions that are clean and help customers achieve sustainable growth. We will continue to implement our digitalisation roadmap step by step to increase flexibility in production, focus on cost reduction and development speed, improve efficiency, quality and efficiency, and consistently deliver high quality products. We are also focused on helping our people upskill and meet the evolving demands of the customers. Through various skill-based learning and training programs, our people are gathering the required competencies to serve customers better, to build products that are more sustainable, efficient, and reliable, and gain leadership capabilities to lead the next wave of growth at the company.