Industrial Automation Magazine India

Automation is the only way to balance the manufacturing cost

Published on : Monday 10-04-2023

Rashmi Ranjan Mohapatra, CEO – Business Head, Parry Enterprises (Murugappa Group)

The pressure to bring out new models is high. One of the challenges is retooling. How would advanced automation mitigate this challenge?
The industry has taken a paradigm shift after the advent of Industry 4.0. Customisation is the key for the future. This is where individual customers' demand is coming to the fore.
 
Automation is the only way to balance the manufacturing cost. This helps to mitigate the cost of retooling. Also, it will adapt to the growing demands of customisation. This will also be a key differentiator in the business.
 
Robotics is a highly favoured technology for many applications in automotives. What are the strategies for re-programming these robots quickly for new models of automobiles?
Robots are now going to be more flexible in the days to come. The reprogramming is much easier than in the past. The turnaround time is much less. The robot manipulators will be used heavily to simulate and use the program/s for multitasking.
 
Robots do perform many tasks efficiently, relieving humans from the drudgery of simple repetitive tasks. In future humans will be asked to perform the more complicated tasks using new technologies. How do companies plan to manage to upgrade the skills of humans alongside the new machines?
Cobots will bring in a different dimension of flexibility and adaptability. We will have more usage of cobots in the next few years. It is like an assistant to the human operator. 
 
Reskilling and upskilling is the key to keep the workforce up to date with the technology. The better we do – better is the incentive. 
 
Organisations have structured programs and keep upgrading the skills of the human capital in sync with the investment in capital equipment. 
 
The Skill India movement has come as a boon for this. The institutes today also provide upskilling of the human capital and make them stay relevant in the tech life cycle.
 
One of the key activities in quality assurance is visual inspection. How would automotive finishing lines plan to integrate robots, vision systems and specially AI into this task?
This goes without saying. ML (Machine Learning) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) will perform this task with better consistency for the future. 
 
AI to distinguish OK or NG way better than conventional threshold judgement; decrease miss judgement of OK or NG resulting in higher yield; reduce workers and cost for inspection; increase throughput; reduce human dependent error; and eliminate human dependent quality check level.
  
(The views expressed in interviews are personal, not necessarily of the organisations represented)

Rashmi Ranjan Mohapatra, a BE, MBA from NIT Trichy and  executive program from Harvard Business School has been associated with EV Charging, Industrial Gases, Manufacturing, Titanium Heat Exchangers and Welding for over 28 years. Serves as the CEO Business Head for Parry Enterprises a part of the 55,000 crore Murugappa Group handling Tuflex, Water, Membrane, Travels, Foods Division and Innovation. He was the Managing Director at Kemppi South East Asia and India for over a decade. He has worked with BOC Gases (now Linde), Ador Welding and Roots Multiclean at strategic positions. Having a lot of credentials to his name, Mr Mohapatra has devoted himself into upgrading India's "skill development" sector and was Chairman, Welding Cluster in the Indian Institute of Welding and a National Core Committee member of the National Skill Development Council, FICCI. Not a stranger to plain facts, Mr Mohapatra finds himself wondering about the global economy if all the women in the world were also a part of the workforce. To see this through, he has started the Best Female Welder Competition in India, which is now accredited in the world. Within a span of just a few years, he has also set up 25 'Centre of Excellence for Skill Development' and we can be assured that the number is to rise.
 
For a major portion of his life, Mr Mohapatra has been affiliated with the welding industry not just on a national level but an international level; he is also a Core Committee Member of the Welding Council, CII and a Council Member of Manufacturing in CII Tamil Nadu. A veteran orator, Mr Mohapatra is also a TedX speaker and a keynote speaker at several conferences and universities across the globe. Bringing Industry and Academia together is his passion. He is an Industry Advisor to OP Jindal University, GIET University, Odisha, and School of Management, Puducherry. He is also a mentor and Board Member for IG Drones, a startup from Odisha and specialising in Drones. He was awarded "The Eminent Engineering Personality" by the Institution of Engineers, India in 2021. Email: [email protected]