‘No one wants to become a machine operator doing repetitive jobs’
Published on : Wednesday 22-01-2020
Ramkumar RS, Director Marketing, Kore Mechatronics Pvt Ltd.
What are the leading trends in factory/process automation segment the industry is likely to witness in 2019?
There is a lot of useful data in the shop floor that is not fully harnessed and utilised today. These are spread across as islands of information in PLCs, Control Systems, Manual Log books, Quality Inspection Reports, etc. Too much of manual effort goes into consolidating and making sense of all this data. The integration of OT and IT is the new trend in the field of automation.
Is the formal education sector prepared for the digital leap in terms of skills required?
It is indeed true that bulk of our engineering graduates are not employment ready, particularly for the export led IT sector. Even those who were employed by the Services side of the IT industry are no longer suitable for the products, deep-tech and IP centric domains the IT Sector is moving in. The IT Sector is also concentrated in urban centres like Bangalore and Chennai.
But the very same resources can be quickly trained and deployed in the software side of the manufacturing sector and this can create valuable employment opportunities in Tier 2/Tier 3 towns and industrial clusters. When the demand for this picks up, the supply side will also align itself and raise itself to meet the demand.
The sale of industrial robots witnessed a rising trend in India. Will this impact the job market?
If anyone says we are losing jobs due to robotics, it means they do not understand the aspirations of the youth in Tier 2/Tier 3 towns. No one wants to become a machine operator doing repetitive jobs. They would rather be an Ola/Uber driver in a metro city. What we need is more software and hardware centric jobs in the manufacturing sector. And the coming of Industry 4.0 and Digitisation in the manufacturing sector, is the best source of jobs for these engineers passing out of Tier 2/Tier 3 colleges, where they can get a job closer to their home base.
Are the SMEs keeping pace with their larger counterparts in digitalisation?
The answer is clearly NO. And the reason for that is simple. Tech suppliers (both local and MNCs) have been riding on a hype curve offering a bouquet of solutions without putting understanding the business context of their SME customers. Technology and product lead programs can only create awareness. For adoption, we need to go first with CXO level business consulting, right fit customised solutions that are innovative, India specific, SME specific and implementable in phases.
What are the new products/developments expected from your company in 2019.
We are offering CXO level consulting to SMEs, in a vendor neutral way, so that they can plan their Digitisation and Industry 4.0 initiatives in a phased manner, getting maximum impact at minimum investments.
We will also be launching a Cloud based OEE and Loss Monitoring software on Opex-SaaS model (per machine per month basis).
Ramkumar RS, Director of Marketing at Koremec Group, is one of the members of the CII – Smart Manufacturing Council. He is often invited as a speaker in Industry 4.0 related events such as CXO round tables, panel discussions and workshops, organised by Ministry of Heavy Industries/MSME, AIA, and other industry bodies. Ramkumar has more than 25 years of experience, studying customer requirements and providing customised solutions. He can be reached by email: [email protected]
Kore Mechatronics is Associate Company of Autosys & Koremec group.