Sustainable Lean Manufacturing by Digital Transformation
Published on : Friday 04-12-2020
Sustainable lean manufacturing will reduce wastes and increase efficiency, aligning the industries with UN goals for Circular Economy, asserts Moorthy Ramasamy.
Process Industries have been using Lean Manufacturing principles to improve their value efficiency and to reduce their production waste. They have provided great results in efficiency realisation by reducing costs. These principles could be applied on varied scale of the manufacturing process from a small scale industry to a humungous manufacturing unit. This lean manufacturing process was originally implemented by Toyota. Due to its proven results in increasing efficiency and eliminating waste, it is absorbed by various manufacturing industries globally. Lean is critical to several industries to retain their competency against their low-cost competitors.
In addition to the lean manufacturing concepts, in recent years, the circular economy has also gained significant importance due to the UN SDGs that requires solutions that contribute to sustainable development. These SDGs require the transition from linear to circular economy in an attempt to eliminate waste and accelerate the implementation of these solutions by 2030. Policy makers and industries are coming up with several ways to support this transition to develop competencies to reduce their waste.
UN’s Circular Economy push comes with several economy and environmental benefits and hence it is in the limelight in large economies such as India and China. With this circular economy as the objective, it is imperative that the industries have to further reduce their waste and improve their efficiencies. In order to achieve this target, Industries will have to augment their existing Lean Manufacturing concepts. The biggest question is, how to augment the existing concepts?
With the drastic development in digital world, every manufacturing industry is trying to embrace a new technology to improve its bottom line and to make it sustainable in this highly-competitive world. New digital technologies have increased the amount of data that is available to the businesses and also the data becomes available in a high frequency. These new technologies in the form of IIoT, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, can enhance the existing lean concepts as more powerful and efficient ones. This digital transformation can provide more accurate, precise and timely information to the industrial operations. This high frequency and high accurate data and the digital processing power were almost impossible even a decade ago.
By acquiring digital data on a real-time frequency, industries have a great visibility on their value stream. This will help them to adjust their production levels. This proactive capacity adjusting algorithms will avoid the overproduction of the industries. Basically, this embraces the Just in Time (JIT) production model, which is achieved by real time data algorithms coupled with the traditional production planning method.
Industries can also think about enhancing their raw material inventory management by coupling their ERP systems with their real time production targets. This digital enhancement can prevent unexpected inventory build-up.
By using digital technologies such as block chain, the lifecycle of a product and its value stream can be digitally tracked. This will provide immense value addition beyond production to customers throughout the lifetime of the product.
Using technologies such as AR and VR, factory workers movements and processes can be analysed. These analysis results in optimising their movement and to result in better production layouts that significantly reduces the human manpower wastage. All of the above mentioned improvements can be flawlessly realised by the digital transformation of existing Lean Manufacturing principles.
In order to realise these improvements, every manufacturing plant should address, data acquisition through IT and OT interfaces, standardisation of data management and digitalisation platform that is capable of real-time data analysis.
Data acquisition through IT and OT interfaces can be achieved by the efficient integration of IT and OT systems. This will reduce the data silos within the organisation and allows the smooth handover of production data from OT world and business target data from IT world. Standardisation of data management reduces the additional efforts required to interpret the data received from multiple data sources and to use the data for meaningful purposes for effective decision making. Finally, the digitalisation platform should be carefully selected ensuring flexibility, system integration needs and efficient data security and administration.
On a high-level, implementing the digital transformation of lean manufacturing will result in huge benefits to the industries. To begin with, Industries with sustainable lean manufacturing will be reducing about 25-30% on their operation costs. Digital transformation can save labour costs, sourcing costs, reduce excess inventory levels, reduce unnecessary maintenance and eliminate unwanted production. Overall asset efficiency and equipment effectiveness will increase by 20-30%. AI algorithms can monitor and ensure the effective utilisation and capacity of the asset and reduce their downtime. In addition, this digital transformation will also increase the safety of the workers by reducing safety incidents and also increases the sustainability of the industries.
By adopting the various digital tools that are available today, it is evident that the Industry 4.0 can improve the traditional lean manufacturing concept into a sustainable lean manufacturing that is effective and robust. This sustainable lean manufacturing will reduce wastes and increase the efficiency aligning the industries with UN goals for Circular Economy. However, it may not be a single step process to go from today’s industry to this future sustainable lean manufacturing industry. Industrial leaders should plan with a long term vision and break the vision down into several small steps and walk towards this digital transformation in a firm and committed fashion.
Upon successful coupling of data from various sources into the digital platform, industries will see a value-driven approach that will lead to lower operating costs and higher efficiency that is not attainable in today’s world.
Moorthy Ramasamy is an Automation Expert with more than fifteen years of hands-on experience in automation industry. Currently his focus areas are digitalisation techniques, methods that contribute to value addition and creation in the industry. He blogs about several industrial trends on Automation, AI, Procedural Automation, Robotics, Digital Transformation, Networks, Supply Chain, Asset Management, Data Analytics, IIoT, Wireless Communication, and Cybersecurity, among other topics. He actively participates and contributes to IEEE researches in his focus areas.
Moorthy also contributes to the society by coaching young engineering talents, peer reviewing articles, consulting engineering projects in India and overseas. He can be reached by mail at: [email protected]
