Covid-19 boosts digital manufacturing; a business imperative, say firms

The ecosystem for digital manufacturing in In­dia is visible, said the Gateway House re­search study. It isn't as deep as it is in the West or China but is developing breadth and depth

The Covid-19 pandemic has acceler­ated the process of digital manufacturing. Com­panies that saw it as an option, now understand it as a business imperative. This is particularly true for older facilities that have been working on their modernisation for several years.
 
Brownfield facilities traditionally relied on heavy capital investment for upgrading infrastructure. The pandemic has shrunk operating budgets and capital. But industry 4.0 technologies have made it possible to operate disparate factory assets by digitally linking them with new generation hardware and software systems at a fraction of the cost, according to research study Digital Manufacturing in India done by Amrut Godbole, Indian Navy Fellow, Sagnik Chakraborty, re­searcher, cybersecurity studies programme, and Manjeet Kripalani, executive director, who work at think tank Gateway House. The study said the pandemic has compressed long drawn digitisation plans from two years to just under a month — with immediate results visible.

 
One example is Piramal Glass, according to the Gateway House study. The $330-million, Gujarat-based company is a global producer of moulded glass for the food, pharma, cosmetics and perfumery industries. When the pandemic hit, the demand for perfumes and nail polish bottles dropped, but the demand for food and pharmaceutical glass rose. This enabled the company to be classified an “essential supplies” provider and kept its operations running with a third of its workforce.
 

In short order, Piramal Glass had to innovate. For starters, factory hands could no longer use their electronic fingerprints to enter the facility. So, the company sourced facial-recognition software from a domestic start-up called Smart Infocomm. It had multiple uses — not just at the factory gate but also on the manufacturing line to alert the management on workers violating masks and social distancing in the factory.

 
Samit Datta, global chief supply chain and technology officer at Piramal Glass, said typically, brownfield manufacturers that operate different generations of machines and are looking to upgrade, will replace all at one go. However, they need to think counter-intuitively to optimise capital, and use digital technologies to upgrade. “This creates the foundation for their Industry 4.0 transformation also,” said Datta.
 
Datta used his own advice well. Piramal had planned to commission a new glass furnace, which was to increase capacity from 100 to 145 tonnes per day (tpd). Normally, 10 experts would come from Europe to install the furnace and start operations. Instead, Piramal tapped into augmen­ted reality using smart glasses, most of it procured locally. The furnace was operational in one mon­th. Augmented reality was used for quality assessment too. Foreign customers, who would normally be sent physical samples of glass, were able to inspect their purchases via augmented reality.

 
Piramal had to change the existing on-site operations of its plant to allow for remotely controlled functioning. In seven days, its in-house tech team developed a work-from-home infrastructure to operate the plant remotely, adding on the existing Internet of Things (IoT) stack4 for the manufacturing process. The success was encouraging, and Piramal decided to accelerate its transformation through data analytics. In July 2020, the company hired a management consultant to guide the process as also 11 new data engineers and scientists.
 
In recognition of its inherent business value and accelerated digital journey, the US private equity firm Blackstone acquired a controlling stake in Piramal Glass in December 2020.

 
Another brownfield success story is Siemens India. Its factory outside Mumbai, in Kalwa, is 47 years old and makes low-voltage switch gears. In 2016, the factory began to reconfigure manufacturing lines and double the number of product variants manufactured there to 180. This was done using a proprietary digital twin software and Mindsphere — a cloud and IoT (Internet of Things)-based operating system developed by the parent company in Germany — and resulted in a 20 per cent productivity gain for the facility.
 
With Covid-19, the factory was locked down. In July, production restarted with just 30 per cent of its workers. Using the digital twin that already existed, Siemens Kalwa’s engineers reconfigured the production line to accommodate the new rules, especially social distancing for the assembly line workers, and get back on track.

 
Hemant Narvekar, factory head, led the effort. He said the new norms compressed timelines and expenses as they “could be quickly simulated and tried in the virtual environment, before executing them in the real world”.
 
The ecosystem for digital manufacturing in In­dia is now visible, said the Gateway House re­search study. It isn’t as deep as it is in the West or China but is developing breadth and depth. Four elements of this ecosystem are in place: The digital infrastructure, government schemes, academic learning, and a burst of start-ups.
 
A significant part of the digital infrastructure has been laid by India Stack, an open-source services platform and application programming interface developed by a public-private partnership. It is free for entrepreneurs, small and big business, government and developers, to build their products on. During the pandemic, this platform helped the Indian government disburse funding and subsidies to individuals and entities across the country, instantaneously and at low cost.

 
This platform will help India move beyond services to products, said Sharad Sharma, founder of iSpirt, the non-profit that created India Stack.
 
To capture this nascent and promising trend, the government has moved swiftly. November 2020 saw a $20-billion incentive scheme for 13 competitive sectors of manufacturing to create self-sufficiency. In addition, a serious effort is un­derway to create supporting institutions for manufacturing and for MSMEs, which comprise over 90 per cent of Indian business.
 
To make this happen, new initiatives like Smart Advanced Manufacturing and Rapid Trans­formation Hub (SAMARTH) by the Ministry of Heavy Industries have begun. One such government initiative in Pune is C4i4, which offers coaching and consulting specifically for manufacturing MSMEs that are looking to digitise. During the pandemic, demand for its services grew 30 per cent, not just from small businesses but big exporters too.

 
As Dattatraya Navalgundkar, executive director at C4i4 Pune, explained, “Although MSMEs face cash flow challenges, lack trained manpower and expertise, they need business continuity and are eager to start the digital transformation journey.”
 
The start-ups that were established pre-Covid 19 have seen bustling business. One such example is ClairViz Systems, a technology company providing cutting-edge solutions for digitisation of manufacturing industry. Its co-founder, Aditya Vermani, an engineer who worked with Larsen & Toubro, said, “Despite factories running at 30 per cent, manpower, digital work instructions and maintenance gained traction. We were able to maintain our revenue growth in the constrained financial environment.”

 
State-owned oil refining giant Hin­dustan Petroleum was among ClairViz’s first clients. It had installed and monitored sensors at the company’s Mumbai refinery and oil depots, resulting in improved regulatory compliance.
 
Another company that is seeing an acceleration in the adoption of digital manufacturing is Chizel, a B2B cloud platform for the manufacturing of plastic and metal parts that works with SMEs. Yash Rane, CEO at Chizel, said manufacturing shops are shifting to cloud-based, mobile-first accounting systems and human resource solutions, and to IoT devices to track machine performance. “Although they look like small adoptions, they are laying a solid foundation for the next wave of transformation,” he said.