Think big, start small and move fast
Published on : Monday 14-10-2019
What are the latest trends in automation for the industry?
The latest trends in Manufacturing Sector are more prevalent in Reliability, Safety, Energy Conservation and Production segments. These are 4 key pillars for achieving digital transformation. Today, the User is willing to spend more Capex and Opex wherein the return of investment (RoI) is attainable. For large Capital projects, the design from day one will be on futuristic technologies and current operating plants are likely to go with smaller scale changes, reap the benefits, and then scale up. Predictive maintenance for assets is an area where Users are seeing most effective implementation as well quick results with user-friendly graphical interface and dashboarding. There are successful deployment for these in areas of safety and energy efficiency as well. However, with the release of Virtual Reality, the User is now working upon enhancing the productivity of their technicians and staff.
Is the pace of changing technology too rapid for user industries to adjust to?
Not really. Indian users are very smart in terms of trial and error. They would always prefer to deploy small pilots and once the concept is proven and they see benefits, then only they scale it up. Also, there needs to be top to down approach, because this brings cultural changes and change management is generally not easy to adopt in Manufacturing Sector; hence focus by senior executives in bringing up tools and ammunitions for quicker decisions would be required.
Are the user industries, especially SMEs, adequately informed and equipped to handle digital transformation and its challenges?
Currently, awareness and education around digital transformation is very progressive in nature. Especially SMEs are adopting them at a faster pace compared to large conglomerates. They do face challenges in terms of capital investment for digital transformation, hence the methodology adopted by them is “think big, start small and move fast”. With little investment, if RoI is achievable they adopt it faster because decision making is limited to few key stakeholders in SMEs and that enables quicker deployment and other similar industries replicate it
The Indian market always has its own challenges when it comes to technology adoption, especially the RoI factor. Are things changing?
RoI will always stay a focal point in Indian market scenario. No solutions without feasible RoI will survive here. That’s were a lot of startup companies, ex-IITians have jumped into this digital transformation sector. Today also, RoI will play an important role. Hence, it is important that technology promotion should always be substantiated with sufficient quantifiable results. This is real – solutions today in market are very much aligned to value proposition to any business, which is looking at technology adoption.
Is there a fine balance between total automation and safeguarding jobs?
This is a myth. Automation will never replace jobs rather it is increasing and opening different avenues for jobs in the market. Mundane activities are cut short and is enabling productivity improvement.
Decision making is faster now and efficient. On overall perspective, it’s creating more jobs in the market which are value engineered activities. For example: instead of going out on manual operation round, today technicians can automate the data collection in much faster and accurate way. This helps the technician to give more time in making those insightful decisions at a faster pace. This is helping not just opening newer avenues of thought process but upscaling of technicians is also taken care of.
Anil Bhatia is Vice President and Managing Director, Emerson Automation Solutions India. Emerson has refocused its business portfolio to deliver solutions that bring greater value to its customers.