Many in the manufacturing sector see digital manufacturing as the key future revenue driver, but with no clear direction and fast changing platforms, companies are still reluctant to fully switch to Industry 4.0 at this early stage. At the same time, unlikely competitors are applying pressure, as they start to leverage IoT (Internet of Things). Data is becoming the new source of value and real time connectivity with their vendors allows digital manufacturers to build smarter supply chains and intelligent ecosystems.

Seen from a small to medium business perspective, digital manufacturing has reached a tipping point: mass customization has become reality. While traditional manufacturers focused on scale, the advanced manufacturing technologies necessary for high value manufacturing are being miniaturized and made much more affordable. This provides a big opportunity for small manufacturing startups.

There are so many new different technology platforms to choose from and to combine with new ideas that innovation in digital manufacturing will likely double every two years. On a larger scale, digital manufacturing systems allow manufacturing engineers to create their dream manufacturing process in a virtual environment, including:

1) Ergonomics

2) Tooling and Resources

3) Assembly Lines

4) Work Centers

5) Facility Layout

A simulation of the production processes can be performed, with the intent to re-use existing knowledge and optimize processes before products are manufactured. Digital manufacturing allows a feedback loop from the actual production to be incorporated into the product design process. The simulation capabilities also help reduce commissioning costs by validating robotics and automation programs virtually.

So to what degree does digital manufacturing actually reduce cost ?

The most dramatic results appear in a measurement of new process implementation time from an aerospace equipment manufacturer. In this example, the company reports shrinking process learnout (the number of parts manufactured before the part reaches sufficient quality) from 125 flawed parts to 4 in a single test case. Other impressive improvements include an 85% reduction in required changes to robotic welding lines in an automotive firm, and a 75% reduction in overall time and cost for tool design in an aerospace firm.

What are the investments I have to make to reap those benefits?

Your investments (time and money) would need to go into digital manufacturing software, training and standing up IT Servers, plus a new development business process and training for it. Finally, it requires a cultural change and accepting that things are now done differently and more efficiently.

An aerospace company typically combines the use of 3D digital models and digital manufacturing tools to enable it to reduce total product development time by 40%, and its total cost of new product development by 70%.

So does this mean digital manufacturing is only applicable to large-scale manufacturing?

No, absolutely not. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, it also provides an opportunity for small and medium enterprises, as the customer base is demanding more and more customization. Although the initial investment may be higher than traditional business models, the benefits and differentiation to other businesses is key in order to grow your business and provide added value to your products.

Small businesses could also concentrate on producing for digital worlds, like it is already done in Second Life. Those same 3D models can also be taken to other worlds and be copied at no cost and produced at no cost. But originality and owning your content is crucial, illegal copies of existing products will be removed, like the poor rabbit, that  in Second Life starved to death because it wasn’t allowed to be fed anymore. Simply put reproduction or distribution of copyrighted work is illegal.

Once you protect your products from being copied, you can make money in Second Life, like the 3D modeler in this video. Shops are open 24/7 as the digital world never sleeps.

I hear a lot about digital twins. How is a digital twin related to digital manufacturing?

A digital twin is a copy of an item in digital space, in most cases an IoT device, like a wind turbine, a drone, a robot etc. You could have a machine on the machine floor and an actual digital copy of it in your virtual space. You could reconfigure it and try out new ways of production. You could simulate failures, or analyze real failures remotely on screen, based on sensor information. This could help a mechanic or electrician bring the right replacement component with him, which reduces downtime and the cost of fixing the machine. Typically I see digital twins being used in large or distant production facilities, which are less expensive to operate, but where production downtime can cost millions of dollars.

Alternatively, if digital twins are movable objects, such as robots in a warehouse or flying drones, the digital twin can be used to simply locate the device, or even for an AI algorithm to find more efficient ways to organize them, such as a flight-path for drones.

So it looks like not only today’s businesses will go digital, but whole industries as well. Maybe we should call it Hello World 4.0!

Smart factories are a revolution in the making

Smart factories could add $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in value added to the global economy in five years.

SMART FACTORIES TURBO-CHARGE MANUFACTURING PERFORMANCE

Manufacturers expect smart factories to drive performance improvements that significantly exceed previous efforts.

Manufacturing under Industry 4.0 has access to digital technologies such as the Internet-of-Things, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Robotics, 3D printing, and Cloud Computing that have opened the door to incredible gains for early adopters.

The current and expected benefits of these developments are significant. Manufacturers expect on-time-delivery of the finished products to accelerate by 13 times, while quality indicators to improve at more than 12 times the rate of improvement since 1990. They predict the cost items such as Capex & Inventory to be rationalized at 12 times and material, logistics & transportation cost to be rationalized at 11 times the rate of improvement since 1990. At the same time, overall productivity and labor cost improvements are reported to accelerate at 7 times and 9 times the rate of growth since 1990, respectively.

Manufacturers across segments are harnessing the potential of smart factories, with industrial manufacturing seeing the biggest gains in productivity and quality of output

HOW CAN MANUFACTURERS ENSURE THE SUCCESS OF THEIR SMART FACTORY INITIATIVES? LOOK TO DIGITAL MASTERS

Digital Masters have leapt ahead of beginners on key digital and transformation parameters. They provide the blueprint others can follow to achieve similar success.

To understand what differentiates digital masters and beginners, we analyzed the parameters of our two dimensions: digital and transformation management intensity.

Digital Intensity: For digital intensity, digitizing processes and leveraging advanced digital technologies were two key differentiators. We see that a significant majority of digital masters (approximately 80%) said that more than 50% of their processes in all the key areas have been digitized, while less than a third of beginners responded in the same way. Similarly, only a fifth of all beginners are leveraging key technologies such as big data or advanced robotics, whereas a significant majority of digital masters leverage these technologies.

WITH THE ROADMAP TO SMART FACTORY SUCCESS LAID OUT, MANUFACTURERS MUST COMMIT TO DIGITALIZATION

By learning from digital masters, organizations that have not yet realized smart factory success can discover how to better achieve their targets.

Our survey shows that digital masters take a holistic view of their transformation to smart factories. Moreover, ninety-eight percent of digital masters have established a roadmap for their smart factory initiatives, compared to 41% of beginners. We have seen that digital masters are reaping the rewards of this structured approach.

However, a large majority of organizations are still journeying to attain the maturity level of digital masters. This means that there are different strategic imperatives for manufacturers depending on their digital maturity.

For a detailed look at key characteristics of Digital Masters, read our report on Smart Factories: How can manufacturers realize the potential of digital industrial revolution.

The world of manufacturing is changing, and in the process of speaking with clients, I’ve been asked repeatedly about what role digital technologies and automation will play in the next generation of factories. As I’ve told them every time, digitization will be central to smart factories, which represent a new revolution in manufacturing. It will completely transform the way that we observe, evaluate, and drive processes and resources within production lines.

How has it been done until now?

Until now, manufacturers have been using Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), also frequently known as Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solutions or methodology. This was an attempt to gain increased visibility and control into the manufacturing processes to increase its effectiveness, ensure compliance, and improve flexibility. This marked an important step towards the automated monitoring of production lines and factories.

Considered as the “ERP of the shop floor,” MOM solutions have largely advanced at a slower pace during the early 2000s. Preoccupied with long and complex ERP implementations, most organizations were unwilling to initiate risky MOM projects as any failure could block production for hours or days. At the same time, unavailability of digital technologies made it difficult to realize ROI for such projects.

MOM solutions suffer from a number of challenges. Their role has been predominantly limited to executing the instructions from ERP (when and how much to produce) and PLM systems (how to produce) with little scope for deviations. With ERP and PLM systems having daily or weekly update cycles, it becomes difficult for MOM solutions to manage production processes in real time, anticipate problems, or respond to unplanned events or unexpected incidents. Finally, MOM solutions have struggled to support event-driven production operations.

So we need a smarter, flexible solution that leverages digital technologies such as IOT, big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence. This needs a combination of methods, architecture, software, and hardware to anticipate or react instantaneously to inputs from diverse sources and systems. It also requires a seamless integration with the enterprise supply chain and PLM solutions, best-of-breed shop-floor solutions and smart assets. Such capabilities are limited in today’s solutions. So how do we get there?

Smart MOM: the next step

The Smart MOM vision proposed by Capgemini Digital Manufacturing services line outlines the advent of such a solution leveraging comprehensive orchestration and machine learning. It helps you realize the full value of your Digital Manufacturing initiatives. By completely connecting operators and all of your assets and introducing smart devices, Smart MOM allows a new level of digital intensity.

Smart MOM will be able to manage Shop Floor operations–such as logistics, production, quality control, and asset maintenance–in real time. By collecting data from every asset and operators, Smart MOM provides a complete overview of your manufacturing process to either allow a supervisor to communicate with the work force, make an informed decision or an automated manager to trigger new actions, reroute work, reorganize assets, adjust parameters, or create new orders based on predefined rules. This comprehensive overview will be an essential part of the smart factory, serving as the core of your digital operations.

How Smart MOM improves on existing systems

Through the use of digital technologies and smart devices, Smart MOM builds upon the original intent of MOM to make your production processes more dynamic, responsive, and adaptive.

IoT helps increase the visibility of essential data and ensures that the right information is available to the right people at the right time. While IoT manages your data flow, Smart MOM will build upon your improved capacity for data availability and analysis in order to create a smoother business process flow. With the proper implementation of automated operations management, you will be able to connect multiple factories so that your supervisors have the ability to make decisions and take action across numerous sites simultaneously.

As a result, the ability of your processes to respond and adapt to new information and demands related to the shop floor is increased dramatically, allowing for preemptive as opposed to reactionary decision-making. This will improve the fluidity and dynamism of your smart factory. With Smart MOM as your primary tool for monitoring and analyzing your manufacturing process, manufacturing and supply chain supervisors will be empowered to more effectively manage your operations.

Ultimately, Smart MOM’s greatest impact is in how it adds to your supervision capabilities. By adding a variety of tools, Smart MOM allows your supervisors to anticipate unplanned events and better manage your processes. With dynamic dispatching and sequencing, remotely controlled operations, and set up of smart assets as well as dashboards that utilize predictive maintenance and manufacturing intelligence, you will not only be able to spot breakdowns in your manufacturing process before they take place but react to them quickly. This is further strengthened by flow simulations tools and on-demand simulation services that are incorporated into Smart MOM. All of this means that your manufacturing process will respond more quickly and be more empowered to change and adapt to future challenges.

What’s the next step?

As you consider the task of updating your factories and embracing Industry 4.0, it’s important to consider how your operations management will similarly need to be updated. We are moving into a new world of manufacturing, one built upon an interconnected process and comprehensive data. So that means that we need to evolve our methods of operations management to keep pace and support new developments.

The smart factory is the future of manufacturing and Smart MOM will play a key role in its success. I recommend to start thinking right away about how your organization can take advantage of digital technologies and automation so that when you are ready to implement your own smart factory initiative, you will be ready to reap the benefits immediately.

I recently attended a webinar on Digital Manufacturing and was taken aback when I heard a different point. The speaker said “Industry 4.0 is all about IOT”. I pondered over it, “Is that correct?” undoubtedly; the answer is a simple “No”. Then what is correct? Should we say IIOT instead of IOT? Or simply add some more technology elements here to extend the scope. It would be futile to dwell too much with a theoretical definition, perhaps we shall focus more on implementation and outcomes.

“There is no perfect definition, there are perfect definitions.”

Around the world, manufacturing industry is experiencing a digital revolution; “Industry 4.0” has taken traditional manufacturing by a storm. Cyber Physical Systems, Internet of everything, SMART Factory, and Digital enterprise, are frequently and commonly used buzzwords now. This has raised expectations and industry professionals are very optimistic about this technological change. Research shows that about 40% of companies have made good progress on Industry 4.0 implementation and have witnessed fantastic results. Several sectors will see substantial growth over next five years and are gearing up to adopt and capitalize on this opportunity.

On the other hand, there is also uncertainty among manufacturers about implementing Industry 4.0 and skepticism about this being just another empty catchphrase. However, I believe that it is a game changer. Industry 4.0 intends to build the technical attributes to achieve efficiency and scale, and weaves a digital thread across the value chain. It sounds simple but many organizations are yet to start. Those who have made the investment have experienced few difficulties to reap the benefits. There are questions around the starting point and the end goal and there is also some confusion on the outcomes. I see many organizations are currently evaluating Proof-of-concepts (PoC) to build business cases. So where should one start? It is an imperative for organizations to define Industry 4.0, the vision and an implementation strategy. That is first and the most important step. Only 16 percent of manufacturers have an overall Industry 4.0 strategy in place, and just 24 percent have assigned clear responsibilities to implement it.

Is Industry 4.0 all about engineering of the value chain and acceleration of exponential technologies? Or is it more about vertical networking and horizontal integration?

What is the goal of these initiatives? Is it only to exploit technology and replace humans with robots? Or to build innovative business models, enhance customer experience, and achieve mass customization?

These questions shall be answered. First, the key is to define what Industry 4.0 means to you. This should be tightly aligned to the goals you want to achieve. Second, formulate a vision and strategy that clearly stakes out different phases of implementation and milestones. Finally, communicate with people on the ground to ensure the proper execution, Involvement at all levels is required to truly embrace this revolution.

To summarize,

“Digital Transformation is highly dependent on clear top-down governance. An uncoordinated array of bottom-up initiatives will block the path towards Industry 4.0”