“Build to order over build to stock is the new manufacturing mantra”
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
What are the leading trends in factory/process automation segment the industry is likely to witness?
Let us examine the five trends that will shape the industrial segment, which are affecting value creation and thereby value capture in manufacturing:
Product as a Service – By transforming from “legacy” to “smart”, products are now fast emerging as full-fledged platforms that address multiple needs rather than serve a single purpose. For example, look at the way connected cars are revolutionising the concept of transportation.
Customisation – Consumers are no longer passive customers. The increasing personalisation of technology has meant that consumers now want products that suit their needs. With technologies like AI, manufacturers are relying on hard data to create products that are intuitive to the needs and wants of individual customers. Take the case of customised medical devices that suit a single patient’s condition.
Design disruption – The advent of new technologies like automation, robotics, machine learning and AI is bringing about radical changes in not only product design, but the entire product life cycle itself.
Faster speed to commercialisation – Interconnected technologies associated with Industry 4.0 have revamped the supply chain by minimising the role of intermediaries and facilitating direct consumer engagement.
Distributed manufacturing – Build to order over build to stock is the new manufacturing mantra. The emerging models of manufacturing is making production more optimal and cost effective, eroding barriers to learning, entry and commercialisation.
The factory of the future will be driven by two primary objectives – to enable faster product regeneration and ensure optimisation of assets & facility. With IoT cutting across the entire value chain from design to field service, there are several fundamental building blocks of a smart factory. These include design system integration, transition to a paperless Model Based Enterprise, where a common communication framework is designed to support the entire design process and the development cycle and finally, deployment of analytics to drive efficiencies through small changes.
What are the new products/developments expected from your company in 2019?
QuEST has market leading pervasive digital technologies that we couple with our engineering, process, and product expertise in the industrial and high tech domains where we have depth & experience. This allows us a unique perspective to provide insights, outcomes, and digital solutions that matter. We provide digital solutions on the edge, IoT and enterprise Software for internal & external applications, for connected factories, and have blue print solutions born in the high tech space that we are bringing to the industrial market. As part of digital factory; we are helping our customer in accelerating the adoption of digital product engineering and manufacturing. Offering services like migrating legacy product definition to model base definition, developing tools for MBD consumption at shop floor and supply chain. In year 2019, we plan to focus on adoption of new age technologies in three key domains, namely digital product engineering, connected factory and brilliant manufacturing.
#1: To enable digital product engineering, the adoption of software providing two channels of product design – the model centric design or model based definition and additive design or additive manufacturing. The model centric design benefiting across the manufacturing process – planning and simulation, production planning and scheduling, part production, inspection and analysis, and finally, assembly and testing.
#2: For creating a connected factory, IoT driven supervisory systems and data collections and controls enabling the integration at the shop floor through Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). At the plant level, this involve enhancing Human Machine Interaction and Machine-to-Machine interaction for driving increased productivity and efficiency by automating mundane tasks and allowing predictive maintenance.
#3: To achieve brilliant manufacturing, Enterprise level software (ERP and PLM), Big Data, Cloud computing and manufacturing informatics supporting the seamless integration of enterprise and shop floor execution. This helps to meet the entire spectrum of digital manufacturing goals – product definition, resource planning, IoT enabled machines and business operation, decision making and optimisation.
(This interview is part of a series on Digital Trends in 2019)