Indian manufacturers look beyond automation to make factories smarter

Businesses are monitoring live production feed online to improve efficiency and reduce cost of manufacturing

Despite automating several processes at its factories in the US, Sri Lanka and India, specialty glass maker Piramal Glass struggled to bring costs under control owing to huge losses on the production line. To fix this, the company recently turned to technology giant Microsoft for one of its smart factory solutions.

Using Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft helped Piramal Glass acquire data from sensors installed at the production lines to identify quality parameters at each stage and get insights on line efficiencies in real-time. This works in tandem across the company’s 46 production lines across four plants -- Kosamba and Jambusar in Gujarat, India, one each in Sri Lanka and the US -– which together employ 3,500 people. 

With the new solution, Piramal Glass it has now been able to improve production efficiency and has seen a cost reduction up to 70 per cent as compared to a glass industry manufacturing execution system (MES). 

"While in the normal glass industry up to 10 per cent rejections are possible, specialised glass manufacturers witness up to 25 per cent rejections due to multiple factors like raw material, temperature or variable nature of ingredients. With real time feedback through various IoT devices on the floor, the paper-based feedback loop that would take a few hours in the past and resulted in multiple rejected products could be reduced to a bare minimum," says Vijay Shah, CEO of Piramal Glass. 

The company is just one example where solution providers such as Microsoft, and new entrants PwC and EY, are vying to help manufacturers maximise efficiency at their already automated factories.

India offers a huge opportunity for smart factory solutions, with almost 70 per cent of the market being ready to adopting these services, according to industry reports. Even IT services players, both Indian and global, are eyeing this space and have been building solutions to support new-age technologies such as automation, cloud and IoT.

A major part of this includes solutions for the manufacturing sector ranging from demand forecasting, equipment monitoring, fleet and logistics management and predicting breakdown of devices, all of which are being monitored through the IoT on the ground. The idea is to give B2B customers a B2C experience, where they can monitor every step of how their end products progress through the production line.

Earlier this year, Swiss-Swedish industrial and power giant ABB unveiled a smart factory in Bengaluru, its second in India, where it is producing industrial-grade switches to be used at large power generation and distribution plants across the world. Apart from feeding ABB’s own requirement for power electronics, the factory, it said, was also a showcase to other clients who it helps in setting up such factories.

Using a plethora of sensors to monitor machinery, workers on the floor at an individual level, and also the quality of products being manufactured, the ABB smart factory relays this information via the internet to executives sitting anywhere around the world. This information also helps sourcing teams plan their inventories and sales teams gain better visibility on the availability of products, something that has been hard to do in traditional manufacturing.

According to a recent report by KPMG-ASCP, 66 per cent of the organisations in India stated that poor forecasting accuracy is the biggest challenge followed by 51 per cent, which asserted that lack of end-to-end supply chain visibility is a challenge in better planning. While 78 per cent stated that poor integration between manufacturing systems and business plan was a top challenge for them, 61 per cent said unavailability of right resources with technical skills was a key issue which highlights the need for greater efforts in skill building.

However, change doesn’t come easy, especially for the people working on the factory floors. Piramal Glass says it has been paying special attention on how to get its workforce on board with new initiatives. “We conducted close to 35 roadshows getting people on board about the benefits of digitisation. We even used simulation to help evaluate employees on their level of understanding of the digital,” said Poorav Shah, Chief Digital Officer at Piramal Glass.

At its smart factory in Bengaluru, ABB has adopted a constant learning methodology to ensure that workers on the shopfloor are in sync with requirements. Each tool is IoT connected, delivering the right amount of torque to screws and bolts, while screens direct workers with examples of how to place the devices on the provided jigs. Moreover, the system continuously collects data from each worker, helping evaluate them while also identifying bottlenecks in the system when a process is too complicated.

“Sectors where we see demand (in India) include both process industries and discrete Manufacturing, which have very good use cases for digital manufacturing. Specifically auto/auto-components, consumer goods, life sciences, oil & gas, chemicals/agro-chemicals are witnessing good demand,” said Andrew Caveney, Global Leader, Supply Chain & Operations, EY.