Manufacturing today partnered with Cisco to host a round table discussion on smart manufacturing
By TEAM MT
CISCO, WITH MANUFACTURING TODAY, presented a Think Turf series on ‘Making the Shop Floor Smart for Manufacturers’. The most recent edition
was held in Gurgaon and it witnessed a wonderful response from the industry. Bringing together an elite group of 15 manufacturing heads, from multiple industry genres, the event highlighted topics such as Internet of Things, Smart Manufacturing, Employee Training, Automation, M2M Communication, Predictive Analysis, and Integration of IT and OT, all of which were extensively discussed. BDB India Pvt. Ltd was the knowledge partner and set up a great programme to reflect on issues that are instrumental to shop floor operations.
The panellists included Arun Sonawane, VP, ECF, Finolex Industries Ltd; Sanjeev K Iddalgi, GM, manufacturing, Dabur India; Ajay Kumar, plant head, Victora Tool Engineers (Unit VI); Varun Jha, GM, works, Relaxo Footwear Ltd; Ajay Sharma, product business head, air conditioner, LG Electronics India; Anil Bhatia, GM, manufacturing excellence, Neel Metal Products, JBM Group; Randhir Singh, GM, Havells India; Umesh Macwana, unit head, Uniparts India; Rajan Madan, director, manufacturing, New Holland Fiat (India); Vimal Manchanda, head, business development, Motherson Sumi; Sanjay Agarwal, plant head, Jaycee Auto Fab; Satish Sharma, plant head (Unit III & IV), Victora Tool Engineers; SK Singh, senior manager (systems), IFFCO; Saurabh Sehgal, senior manager (projects), IFFCO; and Viraj Kadam, COO, Henkel Anand India.
NITIN KUMAR, TERRITORY account manager, manufacturing vertical, NCR, Cisco Systems (India), touched at the heart of technological advancement in manufacturing operations, when he stated during his opening speech: “Everyone talks about the connected factory. There are access points (AP) at factories. What we have done is increased the horsepower of the AP. This helps you to offer higher coverage in any of the plants.” His colleague, Vinay Dua, business development manager, industry solutions, Internet of Everything, Cisco, added to this: “With more adoption of networking and communication on the shop floor, there are newer solutions emerging. With the advent of IoE and digitisation of assets, some of you may have adopted completely converged networks and some may be grappling with downtime, because of other networks that may be there.”
Once the tone for the evening was set, Manish Kulkarni, director, strategic initiatives, BDB India, and moderator for the discussion, initiated a round of introductions between those present. Madan first put things in perspective, when he described smart manufacturing to mean that shop floors talk to each other. “It is visible, managed, and issues get reported real time. After installing all the possible technologies and communication systems, the real time feeling is missing. Either data is delayed or not what we are looking for. Everyone wants an integrated system that is cost effective,” he confessed. SK Singh proclaimed that every component should talk to the other and there should be an integrated dashboard to help the person take proactive decisions and reduce cost. Manchanda echoed this sentiment: “Systems that are intelligent enough to know what to produce and when to produce, and raise proactive alerts are good. Information on a dashboard doesn’t mean anything unless it comes to me when I have time to take action. Systems have to be intelligent for me to control cost.”
IT WAS THEN time for the panellists to sink their teeth into the issues at hand, elaborating on pain points and successes alike. Sehgal started off by offering an example of how their units are more than 30-40 years old, with their shop floors being implemented by DCS Yokogawa, Honeywell, and the like. “Now we face difficulties when we want to integrate these with developments and they are not integrating. So we have to incur more cost to get the technology,” he stated. Ajay Sharma’s problem was different: “In our case, the model change over time is an issue. We have many variants in each product. Automation is good, but we are losing time in model changeover.” Sonawane added, “We have a good maintenance system, but need trained manpower. Delays in decision making have a cascading effect and create other problems.”
For Kadam, manpower is a definite challenge, but so is inventory keeping. “In Gurgaon, we have three plants for bulk chemicals for the automotive industry. We get inventory differences. It has to be well integrated so that the differences are less,” he said. Satish Sharma’s company supplies to Maruti Suzuki. With regular new launches by the automotive giant, Sharma’s company needs to make major changes quickly. Problems of quality, cost and delivery are common. As a result, low cost automation and skilled labour are the usual concerns. Ajay Shukla stated, “Once a cost is fixed after orders, then we have to give a deduction to them. Over the years, production cost has gone up. Therefore, we have to reduce our profit margin.”
Randhir Singh pointed out that there is a large dependency on people. “We need low cost automation and to do things with minimum people. We are not on real time order booking and want a system where supplier orders can be controlled based on the trend in the market,” he concluded. Bhatia was also of the opinion that coping with frequently changing customer requirements was a major pain point. Jha suggested that energy was another issue. “We are into seasonable products. One product will use X amount of energy and another will use Y amount,” he explained, saying that quick adaption and flexibility in the system were a must.
When it came to successful implementation, Iddalgi offered, “Labour and automation are both required. So we look at TPM and do small improvements.
These result in a big change in manpower reduction. Last year we reduced 5-10%, and the clause here was that with that we have to increase productivity. The small changes in machines are done by operators themselves.”
Speaking of small changes, Agarwal proclaimed that, over the past 3 years, his company had made numerous small improvements. “Our change over time in many cases is zero. We supply zero defect parts to JCB. We do everything manually. We visit the shop floor and see everything that is needed for us.” However, not all companies sail in the same boat. Macwana faced an issue of welder absenteeism and training. As a result, there was inconsistency in welding quality. “We went in for low cost automation and now the fixture that loads the part for the robot automatically decides where the part is to be loaded. The best part is when the robot is welding, the person is loading.”
With all the plant heads working to integrate the factory and business operations, the panellists had a lot to share and imbibe from each other, making for a spirited roundtable session.