Is Lockdown Calling For More Industrial Automation?
Published on : Friday 03-07-2020
Vallabh Achyut Zende makes a case for increased automation as the way forward given the necessity of the lockdown and its impact over industry.
The world has never seen such a big lockdown in history and definitely it has left a big impact over the society and the global economy, living habits and major impact on industries. The manufacturing industries, which were used to run 24x7 in different shifts and where stopping the production for few minutes was also a big loss, has now been in large parts silent for the past few months. Till a few months back, the world was speaking about globalisation. It has now started talking about localised production as this Covid-19 situation has created a big impact over connectivity of the world. When we talk specifically about Indian industries, these are concentrated in certain parts of India where industries have grown and those regions became favourite destination for investments. Some of the States in India like Tamilnadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh are witnessing good growth over past several years. But, because of this concentration of industry in only certain parts of India, the major issue has come to the fore during this lockdown and that is the migration of labour. This migration of labour due to Covid and lockdown situation from cities to home towns and villages is making us think about what could have stopped the workforce from this migration?
A nation’s economic growth, employment and development plans are largely dependent on the industrial growth, which should not come to a standstill under any situation. Due to this lockdown, industry has lost almost a quarter of a financial year, and even when it has reopened in the unaffected zones with new directives from the GoI, it is functioning with the lowest efficiency. In such a situation, to keep the existence live in the market, many industries have resorted to cost cutting measures like layoffs, salary deferment, putting on hold their development plans, travel restrictions, etc. The impact of lockdown is even bigger on small scale industries. Though the GoI has declared many financial schemes for MSMEs and small scale industries, the real helping hand to small scale industry is going to be the increasing requirement from big manufacturing companies and OEMs.
After a couple of months of lockdown, it is still not clear how the routine life will recommence again normally, because it is totally dependent on the definite medicine and vaccination to control the Covid-19 pandemic. So this situation for industry is very uncertain for coming few months.
Needless to recall again the importance of industries over our lives. Hence the industry has to learn to commence operations regardless of the situation caused by Covid-19. Is it possible?
Need for Automation
Is it really possible that if the situation like Covid-19 rises again, the industry will still be able to run? Up to a certain extent, the answer may possibly be Yes. And this could be possible with more and more adoption of Industrial Automation. As is well known and documented, the various industrial revolutions over centuries are nothing but the successful overcoming of many challenges. And for most of the challenges, the answer was automation. So far the major intention of Industrial Automation was to achieve higher productivity, better quality, smart process monitoring, and increased efficiency and reduced dependency. So can we say that Industrial Automation has now become necessary to keep business continuity against the situations like Covid-19? I think Yes, it is.
During lockdown period, we have experienced many new ways of sustaining our lives, working styles, and learning mediums too. It may be Work From Home (WFH), virtual learning classes and many more online stuff. One thing is for sure that we are now moving faster towards digitisation and IoT (Internet of Things). Rather, during lockdown we understood clearly the importance of the internet. This is nothing but less physical movement and more of moving the real time data through the internet.
While we talk about WFH (work from home) in relation with industries, we must have to clearly distinguish the WFH for software industries and WFH for manufacturing industries. In case of software industries, working from home is no new thing as it was there before lockdown and the requirement of infrastructure for working from home is not much. A laptop and good internet connectivity suffices the need of WFH for software industry. But for manufacturing industry, there are lot of difficulties. Engineering, sales, marketing, documentation teams from manufacturing industry can work from home but in case of functions like production, maintenance, assembly, stores, logistics, quality control it is at all not possible. Then how can these functions operate during lockdown situation? Again the answer comes around to automation only.
When we are emphasising automation as the solution for the situation like Covid-19 for manufacturing industry, it doesn’t mean that industry will run without any human intervention, but it will definitely help to reduce large human interface. There are many ways to implement automation like converting manual processes to semi-automatic and automatic processes, implementing necessary condition monitoring devices to monitor the machine health remotely, applying IoT to get the updates, alerts and real time data at any place, applying Big Data technology, developing infrastructure for the employees to work from home in future as well, implementing the Robots/Cobots for the tasks like loading, unloading, measuring, pick and place and many process applications.
The Covid-19 situation has left a huge impact over global connectivity. Global supply chain of raw materials and finished goods has collapsed during this situation. So industries across the world may start thinking of localised production to counter such a situation in future. This can be seen as a good opportunity for Indian industries to grow. But for making effective use of this latest opportunity under what is described as the new normal, the industry must be well established with necessary automation to continue operating under any critical situation.
Indian industry has huge potential for adapting to different levels of automation. While we are continuously discussing Industry 4.0, this seems to be the right time to think to implement it across the spectrum. Industry 4.0 also talks more about taking industries to more digitisation using major technologies like Big Data, IoT, smart monitoring and quick data analysis.
Many industries have successfully implemented the highest level of automation as well. Fully automated warehouses of the giant e-commerce companies is one of the best examples. Artificial Intelligence and Robots could make it possible.
This lockdown due to contagious disease has raised many questions of human contact, human movement, hygiene maintenance and many more. This has kept manpower locked at home and many had to migrate as it was a question of their sustenance. No doubt that the industry has started facing big question of manpower, but in future industry has to move ahead with lesser manpower at least till the threat of Covid-19 is permanently over.
Manufacturing industry is the most adaptive industry. Discovering the new processes and methodologies to counter complex problems is in the DNA of industry. So considering business continuity in the future to sustain against situation like Covid-19, digitisation, implementation of IoT and automation are going to play key roles for manufacturing industry. Now, industries need to identify the critical areas of their operations and begin the process of automating the operations one step at a time.
Vallabh Achyut Zende is Manager – Mechanical Design Engineering at Haosen Automation India Pvt Ltd. He has Masters of Mechanical Engineering (Specialised in Mechanical Design) from Walchand Institute of Technology, Solapur. Vallabh over 14 years of rich industrial experience in Project and Product design for Industrial Automation. Has worked closely with many renowned OEMs for establishing the Automation, and has been instrumental for managing global engineering programs.
