The manufacturing sector has played a crucial role worldwide in maintaining societal progress with innovations and solutions, creating jobs and propelling growth. The sector has a major contribution in global GDP growth and ensuring national prosperity. In India, manufacturing growth has seen a healthy boost of 3.6 percent in the first quarter of 2015 alone. However, the sector has been undergoing major transformations of late – largely fuelled by disruptive technological advances like the Internet of Engineering Things (IOET). It has impacted the sector majorly in the recent past and holds the potential to transform it altogether.

Mechanised manufacturing brought the world closer with the industrial revolution and even changed our notions of time and space. With the next phase of ‘smart’ manufacturing tethered on the edge, what changes will we see in the world of manufacturing? In order to truly understand the next phase of smart manufacturing, we need to pay attention to the present operational deficiencies plaguing the sector.

CHALLENGES IN MANUFACTURING

The IDC Manufacturing Insights Report 2014 had a clear baseline to offer to manufacturers. It stated that in order to ensure efficiency, the two key focus areas for manufacturers in the near future would be technology and operations. With most companies directing their energies towards building innovative products and yet ensuring total cost reduction, the need of the moment is to ensure line of sight across the manufacturing value chain. If processes cannot be quantified, they cannot be managed to ensure optimum efficiency in process, logistics, resource usage and, ultimately, cost. And this is where manufacturing companies, especially in India, are lagging.

Despite making use of automation for ages in forms of logic controllers, sensors and PC-based control and management, the data generated by these systems are kept separate from internal management systems for reasons including security. The practice makes for silos of information and, for the same reason, remain very limited in application.

MANUFACTURING AND IOET

Disruptive advances like IOET can help in creating a value chain that is ‘intelligent’ of its own accord. In a nutshell, ‘IOT’ describes an environment where most physical objects populating our world are rendered ‘intelligent’ with sensors, so much so that they are able to constantly send and receive data through the internet. The data collected can be used across a network of billions of devices that connects everything from home kitchens to industrial units and medical facilities.

With the fall in prices of standard sensor equipment for industries; individual stores of information in manufacturing units, so far untapped, can now be harnessed to develop both deep and overarching insights into the production system. If implemented, IOET has the potential to transform all aspects of manufacturing, right from engineering and design, to enterprise resource planning (ERP), product development, manufacturing execution systems (MES) and product lifecycle management (PLM).

REAL-LIFE APPLICATION OF IOET

In product design, for instance, manufacturers typically develop and design products with a clear-cut idea of usage context and process. But once the product goes into the hands of the consumer, they have little control over how they choose to use the product on their own. Being able to track live usage and performance can have innumerable applications when it comes to product design. Apart from its regular uses, such as in anticipating maintenance schedules, performance improvement and more, IOET can also help manufacturers understand the real-world usage of their products and streamline features accordingly.

IOET ON THE SHOPFLOOR

Another, often overlooked, aspect of IOET-enabled smart manufacturing is the degree of transparency, accountability and feedback that emerges from detailed insights into factory operations. With operational resiliency at the forefront of supply chain strategies, there can be no place for the traditional ‘blind spots’. The need of the hour is to ensure supply chain flow and operations that yield data in formats that are easily palatable on mobile devices and come with powerful visualisation tools. Access to real-time data means line managers will be able to initiate action wherever and whenever without ever being onsite. This also translates to faster business decisions and actions.

Manufacturing operations can run more efficiently with the application of IOT technology and relevant solutions like MES resulting in less machine downtime, better asset utilisation, and faster time to market. This streamlining of operations, transparency and even further reduction of response time in managing the shopfloor is crucial in meeting the twin demands of lowering production cost and reducing time to market. MES solutions come in handy here because they can be tailor-made to the needs of each organisation and can help close the gap between enterprise systems and plant-floor control equipment thereby connecting shopfloor decisions with corporate level objectives.

MANUFACTURING IN THE NOW

A recent report predicted that IOT spending is set to rise to $3 trillion and nearly 30 billion devices by 2020. Although the benefits derived from IOET may seem too futuristic, Indian manufacturers have actually been progressive in taking note of the changing industrial scenario. Companies like Tata Technologies are already offering solutions to help businesses transition from legacy enterprises to cutting-edge manufacturing units. Through profound domain expertise, their service offerings helps nurture every step from the moment a customer places an order till its fulfillment, in order to best optimize operational efficiencies and business processes for its clients.

With consumer spending on IOT looking up and the government backing home-grown yet technologically-advanced programs like ‘Make in India’, manufacturers in India can perhaps now aspire to a truly global competitive edge from smart shopfloors. All they need to do is to pick the right partner that can provide them with the precise technological expertise and guidance to squeeze out the last drop of competitive edge with 360 degree control of operational efficiency.