How Digital Manufacturing will help Industries?

The digital revolution is now breaching the walls of manufacturing as it continues to disturb media finance, healthcare, consumer products, and other sectors. The explosion in information and new computing capabilities like artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will alter the nature of manufacturing itself. Digital connectivity among designers, workers, managers, consumers and physical industrial assets will unlock huge value and change the manufacturing landscape forever.

Up till now manufacturing generates more information than any other sector of the economy, some companies are harnessing it. One oil-and-gas company, for instance, discards 99% of its information before decision makers have an opportunity to utilize it.

Consider traditional car manufacturers and Uber that are at the highest level in the business of moving people around. They meet people’s transportation requirements not with glass, steel, runner, and salespeople but with data, matching person vehicles and riders by means of smart phones. Barely 5 years into its existence, it is valued at approx. $50 billion, as per a marketresearch.

Response of leading manufacturers to digital:

The methods people and firms use details had shifted dramatically. Information storage is inexpensive and flexible, and advanced analytics and AI are giving us new abilities to draw insights from large amount of information. Advances in AR and VR, next-level interfaces, addictive manufacturing, and advanced robotic are all opening the gates to digital disruption. In the next decade, digital manufacturing technologies will permit companies to connect physical assets by a “digital thread.” This will unleash a seamless flow of data across the value chain, which will link every phase of the product life cycle, from sourcing, design, testing, and production to distribution, point of sale and use.

 

Use Cases:

Pharmaceutical companies are using their deeper understanding of continuous procedures to enlarge constant manufacturing suites with footprints less than half size of conventional factories. Few have even developed portable factories, which can be built in 40-foot trailers. They are utilizing the digital thread to enhance quality control. Some companies are now relying on infrared technology to identify bogus drugs and contaminants devoid of the conventional critical tests.

Worldwide fashion retailer Zara is already renowned for developing and shipping new products within 2 weeks. It is now utilizing digital techniques to respond even faster to customer’s preference and lessen supply-chain costs; connecting reusable RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags to every item of clothing in more than 700 of its 2,000-plus stores. 10 staff members can now update a store’s inventory in less than few hours. Unlike before, it used to take 40 employees for more than 5 hours.  

The aerospace-and-defense industry is using digital tools to amalgamate an extremely complex supply network.  An advance jet turbine engine has hundreds of individual parts, for instance, few of which the engine manufacturer makes in-house and others it sources from a network of dozens vendors. Along with cloud computing-based tools, providers can work together faster and more proficiently. A maker of engine can share 3D models of component design within its network, and each supplier in turn can share data regarding delivery, price, and quality.

Those manufacturers who have implemented digital manufacturing have normally reported substantial advantages from improved procedure and production planning. These advantages include increased production throughout, reduction in capital costs, better use of facilities, reduced lead times, improved product quality, a lessening in operating costs, and a reduction in continued product support.

What does IOT means for Manufacturing Sector?

Manufacturing globally is on the cusp of a revolution. New information technologies are abruptly providing not only to make the management of manufacturing more efficient, since everybody has seen the early versions of plant and enterprise software, however the work itself smarter. Technologies based on the IOT have the potential to radically enhance visibility in manufacturing to the point where each unit of production can be seen at every step in the production procedure.

As per a market research on smart manufacturing and the IOT finds that while 1-5 today admit their factory operations are entirely offline, this will drop to near zero in 5 years.

Use Cases:

· Siemens:

At Siemens’ electronics manufacturing plant in Germany, Amberg, machines, and computer handle 75% of the value chain separately, with few 1000 automation controllers in operation from one end of the production line to the other. Parts being produced communicate with machines by means of a product code that tells the machine their production needs and which steps need to be taken next. Every procedure is optimized for IT control, ensuing in a minimal failure rate. Employees are necessarily supervising production and technology assets, such as handling unpredicted incidents.

· Generic Electric:

At one of GE’s Durathon battery plants, more than 10,000 sensors measure temperature, air pressure, humidity, and machine operating data in real time. This offers the chance to monitor production and adjust procedures in real time, as well as to trace battery performance back to specific batches of powder and at each step along the procedure.

· Cisco:

To better orchestrate it worldwide network of outsourced production plants, Cisco developed- Virtual Manufacturing Execution System Platform (VMES) that offers real-time visibility of production operations. The system leverages technologies like Big Data analytics, cloud, and the IOT to connect and collect real-time information from production machines, allowing analytical quality capabilities in a fully outsourced manufacturing environment.

Orchestrating the whole procedure:

Smart manufacturing needs a healthy dose of technology to ensure machines work together and appropriate, teams of knowledge workers orchestrate the whole procedure, and material flows visibly in real time. What makes this possible is the IOT technology environment. In plant floor applications, the IOT’s can make a network linking a variety of manufacturing assets from the production instruments to parts being produced, from trucks to a warehouse’s smart shelves, from sensor-embedded automation controls to energy meters. With the IOTs, manufacturing can give every of their physical assets a digital identity, which enables them to know the exact location and condition of those assets in real time universally all through the supply chain.

The Right Time to Invest:

Smart Manufacturing, for those ready to get started, is necessarily a platform, which amalgamates a number of technologies, like connectivity technologies, the cloud, and Big Data analytics.

The idea is to use connectivity technologies (for instance, wifi, industrial networks, M2M, etc.) to link factory automation assets (for instance, robots, production equipments, RFID, etc.) to end-user apps (for instance, ERP, PLM, MES, etc.) also mobile devices for more exact and active business executive.

The IOT has a catchy ring to it, however for a number of possibilities are almost too far reaching to imagine. For manufacturer the likely impact of IOT in smart manufacturing looks very big certainly.