Industrial Automation Magazine India

Brownfield factories can now leverage Greenfield benefits

Published on : Monday 23-09-2019

Tell us about a few trends, which have caught the eye of manufacturing industry?

With growing drumbeat for digitisation, adoption of Industrial IoT has been growing in the manufacturing industry. Digitisation is encouraging manufacturing industry by various perceived benefits at the same time enabling possibility of new business models. Interoperability between devices, equipment, machines on shop floors, converting data to valuable information, asset monitoring are few drivers for adopting smart solutions. As a result, manufacturers are benefitting from increased operational efficiency, cost savings, effective production and the ability to respond rapidly to changing customer requirements. In addition to digitising factories and operations, there is a growing desire for customised products, higher product quality and production optimisation. Owing to these demands, factories are emphasising on trends such as industrial transport technology and an integrated approach to machine vision together with advance automation solutions. The range of complex applications relying on these trends has been growing significantly over the last few years.

 

As you said, product quality is one of the main topics in the minds of factory owners, how do you help your customers to improve quality?

Indeed! Quality has always been important, however, today, we find an increased focus on quality in the manufacturing industry. Smart and connected factories are capable of providing data more easily; thus, increasing production efficiency, enabling monitoring of quality in real time, enhancing efficiency and optimising operations. Our integrated machine vision, which is an integral element of the automation ecosystem, plays an important role in maintaining product quality. Our machine vision is integrated in our automation portfolio making it an ideal solution for seamless integration at the same time reducing overall system costs. B&R mapp Technology reduce programming effort by 67% enabling robust, high-performance solutions for position detection, inspection, quality evaluation, measuring and identification amongst others. All industries benefit from our integrated machine vision system by improved quality and productivity, reduced waste, greater product reliability, increased consumer safety and satisfaction.

What are your suggestions for brownfield factories, which will help them achieve Greenfield benefits in their setups?

IoT, digitisation, are no longer buzzwords in India, thanks to increased technology awareness amongst factories and manufacturing setups. However, India is primarily having factories with decade old machinery, i.e., brownfield factories, which are a bit slow in adopting digital technologies due to countless challenges. Closing down brownfield plants or replacing existing facilities with new technology is generally not an option as it would be too expensive and not feasible. Brownfield factories can now leverage Greenfield benefits in their setups with a minimum capital investment within no time with small or no modification to existing systems. With B&R Orange Box, we are able to provide Greenfield installation benefits to Brownfield installation in a cost-effective method. Orange Box lets users’ access previously unreadable energy and process data from digitally isolated machinery without any changes to existing hardware or software. The Orange Box has already been able to acquire and evaluate OEE data, but users now benefit from an even broader range of possibilities. With the new Energy, PackML and Tweet functions, they can monitor energy consumption and process execution, as well as send automated text message notifications. Now plant owners can choose to easily retrofit rather than retire their brownfield sites by keeping overhead costs down and maximising usage of current assets.

In highly competitive market, consumers are demanding customised products, how can manufacturers cater to such demands keeping cost in mind?

Need for individualised or customised products is on the rise in India, especially in consumer goods, printing and packaging industries. With a sudden shift consumer demands, machine builders cannot afford to ignore this trend and need to provide cost-effective solutions to factories with short lead times as well as short changeover times. As machine builders are endeavouring to meet this demand, adaptive machine is the next accelerant in their quest for mass customisation, where ongoing production need not stop to change over between product variants. Machine stoppage eventually hampers valuable production time, squandering the benefits of mass production. B&R’s SuperTrack and ACOPOStrak are flexible, intelligent product transport technologies for adaptive manufacturing. They have on the fly changeover capabilities with possibility of reconfiguring for different product variants on a single machine. Our industrial transport technology has practical batch-of-one manufacturing and packaging capability. Visitors to B&R stall at Hall 1 Stall S1 at Automation Expo 2019, Mumbai will get to experience the fast, reliable and cost effective transport technology for mass customisation.  

Market leaders are already leveraging benefits in their global set ups, what is your suggestion to Indian SMEs and MSMEs to embark on the digitisation journey?

Digital transformation has enormous opportunities for Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises. However, they are lagging behind on the digitisation journey due to countless challenges such as lack of awareness about technology, benefits, investment and RoI. Moreover, a lack of planning, strategy of implementation, an unclear roadmap for implementation further increases the adoption challenges. On the contrary, Government initiatives like Digital India, Skill India and Startup India are set to deliver benefits to SMEs and MSMEs by accelerating the wave of digitisation in the sector. I recommend MSMEs and SMEs to take advantages of various such schemes. I would usually recommend MSMEs and SMEs to understand and gain knowledge of the available technologies. They can then look at identifying gaps in their existing operations, processes in their factories or machine building process. Based on this analysis they can easily map the available technologies in the market for bridging the gaps. Approaching the digitisation journey is a systematic way provides a clear picture of benefits and investment. In addition, I would recommend them to have milestones in implementation, i.e., to have one technology implementation observe the benefits and then move on to implementation of next technology. This will help them to further monitor investment against benefits. Finally, selecting the right partner in the digitisation journey would expedite the adoption of technologies and guarantee a successful implementation.