The rise of smart manufacturing is revolutionizing the industrial landscape. This transformation, influenced by growing amounts of complex data, extends beyond big plants and large-scale manufacturing.
Kunal Ramesh Dhande, a Senior Manager at Continental, shared his experience in managing digitalization projects as part of his talk at the Smart Manufacturing & IoT Summit in Berlin. From his experience, smart development is vital for any manufacturing process, especially since gaps often exist between processes - from receiving requests from engineers to test facilities.
What are the benefits of smart manufacturing?
Boost Efficiency & Productivity
Smart manufacturing automates processes, which reduces manual labor and streamlines operations for faster production. This results in a significant boost to efficiency and productivity.
Improve Quality Control
By integrating sensors and analytics, smart manufacturing ensures consistent product quality and minimizes defects, leading to improved quality control.
Enhance Flexibility
Smart manufacturing allows for quick adjustments to production processes. This enables companies to adapt to changing market demands, thus enhancing their flexibility.
Reduce Costs
Automation and optimization in smart manufacturing lead to lower labor costs, reduced waste, and more efficient resource usage, playing a significant role in cost reduction.
Gain Competitive Advantage
Companies that embrace smart manufacturing stay ahead by producing high-quality goods more efficiently. This enables them to respond faster to market changes, giving them a competitive advantage.
Enable Data-Driven Decision-Making
Smart manufacturing generates a vast amount of data that can be analyzed to identify opportunities for improvement. This enables informed decision-making based on data.
Contribute to Sustainability Efforts
Through resource optimization and waste reduction, smart manufacturing supports environmental sustainability goals. This helps companies meet consumer and regulatory expectations regarding sustainability.
What is the scope of smart manufacturing?
Smart manufacturing extends beyond the factory floor. It also involves the prototyping phase, which is a part of product development. Each prototype development iteration impacts the final product cost, highlighting the need for smart manufacturing implementation throughout the entire product lifecycle. The goal of this comprehensive approach is to achieve cost reduction, increase productivity, and address other key points.
Production IIoT data for smart manufacturing
Smart manufacturing relies on Production IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) data as its foundation. This involves various stages and resources, including IoT sensors and edge devices, edge computing, factory data centers, private and regional clouds, and public clouds. Data acquisition is made using IoT sensors, environmental monitoring, and computer vision. This data then undergoes analysis through digital twins and AI. The resulting insights facilitate data-driven decision-making, leading to increased automation and the use of co-bots (collaborative robots), which enhance human productivity. Furthermore, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) play a crucial role in training and productivity enhancement.
Leveraging CrateDB for IIoT data
CrateDB, the enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors, combines SQL's simplicity with NoSQL's performance for instant insights. It offers real-time analytics, scalable storage, and predictive maintenance for Smart Manufacturing. CrateDB provides robust solutions as IoT data stream management and analysis, enabling device monitoring, insight extraction, and IoT deployment optimization.
Smart manufacturing represents a transformative power in the industrial sector. To successfully navigate this transformation, one needs a clear vision, the necessary skills, essential resources, and the ability to take decisive action. As Kunal Ramesh Dhande points out, “This is key to transforming any project, any business. You need these five things: vision, skills, essential resources, and action that's equal to change. If any one of these is missing, it may cause confusion, anxiety, resistance, frustration, or false starts." By embracing these key elements, organizations can successfully harness the advantages of smart manufacturing and thrive in the modern industrial landscape.