The Preference for Tools Based on Popular and Open Standards
Published on : Wednesday 03-01-2024
Sudhanshu Mittal, Head & Director Technical Solutions, Nasscom Center of Excellence – IoT & AI, Gurugram.
What are the key aspects to consider for a typical company that wants to switch over from a traditional manufacturing process to an automated environment?
Switching over from the traditional manufacturing process to an automated system requires the management to consider multiple technical and human challenges. These include:
• Creating balance between CAPEX and RoI. It is an established fact that after a point we find diminished RoI on CAPEX. Creating a balance whereby the right level of automation is performed is an essential task that management needs to plan for.
• Current readiness for the automation/system maturity.
• Capabilities of the workforce in taking up the automated environment and successfully managing it. This may include the reskilling, morales, cultural changes, job redefinition, process changes, etc.
• Future scaling up of automation tools being used, reliability, and data security are critical technology aspects that need to be addressed when planning for the transition.
• Effective collaboration with automation partner(s). Enterprise needs to work with automation vendors as partners and stay closely engaged all through.
How scalable are automation and digitalisation solutions for different sizes of manufacturing facilities?
Scalability is critical to any automation activity. The tools (both software and hardware) should not become bottlenecks as the company looks to scale up its operations. Tools based on popular standards and open standards are the most preferable as those prevent the vendor lock-in and provide capability to work with different vendors in future.
A large enterprise may use a tool like SAP or a high end automation platform like PTC, but this may not be suitable for a small enterprise, both from the cost and tool complexity perspective. This makes the job of selecting appropriate tools more challenging for small enterprises. However most of the MSME category suppliers also try to follow open standards as much as possible, primarily due to demand from the customers so manufacturing players should try to prioritise those.
What are the initial costs associated with implementing factory automation and digitalisation?
The key components of initial costs for factory automation implementation are purchase and installation of the requisite tools, reskilling of workers, initial downtime and production losses, upgrading the existing infrastructure for data security and compliance and any required interface changes with customers. We also can add the time being spent by the leadership team to the initial cost, however ultimately, they should save much more time due to the automation processes.
The recurring costs will include the tool maintenance and upgrade costs associated with the hardware and software purchase.
How does the adoption of automation and digitalisation impact the skills required for the workforce?
The skill requirement impact has two areas – first the required skills to manage the automation and digitalisation and secondly, the skill upgrade for workers so that they are able to perform tasks which machines can’t do and prevent themselves from becoming redundant.
Regarding the automation management, the workers will be required to build digital and technical proficiency, as well as have sensitivity to the data being generated from manufacturing processes as the leak of digitised data is much easier than the traditional paper-based data. Workers will need to develop capabilities for data analysis – while the dashboard will surely provide the information, the feel of those on ground about operations can’t be fully replaced by machines.
Regarding the second point about workers protecting themselves from getting replaced, this will require the workers to develop leadership and management skills so that they can guide the changing processes. They will have to develop soft skills as their role will become larger and may require more collaboration with team members and outsiders. Being able to define the problems that technology should address will be an important area where workers can leverage their domain knowledge and experience to stay relevant to the organisation.
What regulatory considerations should manufacturers keep in mind when implementing automation and digitalisation with respect to safety and security?
Automation and digitalisation require manufacturers to stay abreast of various guidelines. Some of the guidelines include occupational safety and health administration, various ISO standards regarding the workplace safety and any industry specific standard like FDA.
Apart from this the digitalisation will impose data safety and security requirements. Depending upon the scale, it may include GDPR, relevant cybersecurity standards, Intellectual Property protection requirements. Enterprises may have to put relevant clauses in their agreement about IPR protection with their vendors as well, in order to protect themselves from any intentional or unintentional IPR violation by the vendor.
How can existing machinery and systems be integrated into a digitalised manufacturing environment, and the challenges in the integration process?
Integrating the existing machinery and systems into digitalised manufacturing (brownfield transformation) requires multiple activities to be done:
• Assessment and planning – first the on-ground assessment of existing machines and their readiness to be part of the digitalised manufacturing needs to be done. In majority of the cases the existing machines will not be capable of digital connectivity and data acquisition and in many of the cases no documentation about the machine will be available. In such scenarios, a detailed planning will need to be done about the required instrumentation to be done, how this is to be done and how much of instrumentation is actually possible. All these aspects will determine the level of digitalisation and how to go about that.
• Instrumentation – once the assessment has been done, the instrumentation of existing machines has to be done so that relevant data can be collected from them. With old machines without any documentation, this will be a big challenge and it may be decided that some of the machines just can’t be instrumented properly and have to be left out of the automation process. An analysis of what this means in terms of overall digitalisation, will be required.
• Required software platform and communication standard, interoperability and avoiding vendor lock-in – this is an extremely critical area. Unless we go for large vendors, many of the platforms and hardware modules don’t follow standard protocols. For small enterprises especially, there is a challenge as they have to work with MSME players for cost reasons, but then run into the risk of vendor lock-in. The leadership team will have to analyse the solutioning from all aspects.
• Data management and cybersecurity – for small enterprises, the data management is limited and not much thought is given to cybersecurity. The digitalisation journey will bring this additional requirement that needs to be addressed and may require upgrade of existing IT systems.
• Employee reskilling – this is the most critical activity that may be make or break for any organisation attempting a digitalisation journey. Unless employees have the buy-in, the journey will not succeed. It is imperative that employees are brought in as stakeholders, so they accept the digitalisation journey as something beneficial to them instead of something that will take away their jobs and then try to sabotage it.
• Continuous process – the automation and digitalisation for legacy systems is to be treated as a journey and not one time action. Organisation needs to learn from what has worked for them, what has not and decide upon the future path on this basis.
(The views expressed in interviews are personal, not necessarily of the organisations represented.)
Having spent 25+ years in technical roles in different companies like HCL, Agilent, Marvell, Freescale, Juniper among others, Sudhanshu Mittal has gained extensive experience in embedded domain in different verticals like networking, storage, printing and imaging, medical equipment, IoT, security, etc. Sudhanshu completed his B. Tech from IIT-BHU in 1990 and is also a certified Intellectual Property Rights professional from Indian Law Institute.
As “Head – CoE Gurugram & Director – Technical Solutions” with NASSCOM Center of Excellence – IoT & AI, Sudhanshu leads the overall operations of Gurugram CoE and is also responsible for driving the solutioning of the problem statements brought by CoE partners. Vertical focus includes Automotive, Healthcare and Standard verticals for CoE-IoT. The key responsibilities include:
a) Driving the digital transformation in different verticals like Automotive, Healthcare, and Manufacturing.
b) Driving academic engagement and research activities, including setting up skilling CoE for academic institutes and industry partners.
c) Mentoring the startups and innovators on product development, fund raising, intellectual property and business strategy. Taking their solutions to the market through enterprise connects.
d) Driving standard body participation from CoE-IoT for Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and various government bodies.
e) Member of PRMC for MHI funded project at C4i4 Pune, member of Governing Body for CMTI Bangalore.