Industrial Automation Magazine India

The interesting thing is, digitalisation is happening right now

Published on : Friday 11-10-2019

Does the Indian manufacturing scenario offer any different challenges in the digital transformation journey?
In my experience based on the interaction I’ve had during the course of the preparation for this presentation, most of them feel their factory is still not at the level required for adoption of Industry 4.0. So the challenge is, depending on the maturity of the factory, you have to define what the digital status of the plant is – it could be just the basic automation or the technology is little above that, and the plant not yet ready for the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. But the baseline is to have a reasonable level of automation, and this could be the challenge. Those presenting here and the customers attending, are probably relatively mature factories. So the market is smaller than what we expect right now in terms maturity, to put a system above that.

Even one of the presenters from a top engineering company admitted that some of their systems date to the Industry 2.0 era. So this is a good beginning?
What I think is really interesting that, regardless of what era of industry revolution they are at, digitalisation is happening right now. What the presenter said was any person they hire is most likely between 20-30 years old, and using digital devices like smartphones and tech savvy, already digital. So if the working environment is traditional and very manual in nature, they would probably prefer to go to another place which is modern. The factory has to become an exciting place for the new age worker with modern engineering and a high tech, futuristic environment. This is a worldwide trend, this notion of workforce of the future. Employers are struggling to find the best workers and to attract them with exciting working environment like, say, the Google workplace. Otherwise the productivity is also going to be very low.

This brings up the issue of most manufacturing units still using legacy equipment. What are the options for digitalisation here?
Things are changing with technology now available with the Internet of Things or IoT. On the one side, you have the traditional automation route with PLCs and sensors that are relatively expensive; on the other side there is IoT with simple sensors to connect to the machines and get the information back to an MES system. So this problem of legacy equipment can be tackled with relatively cheaper and easier methods than before. Having said that, let me balance it by stating that a lot of these IoT devices for factory are not yet reliable for plants that need performance and reliable data. This is something I share with the managers who tell me about connecting their machines to collect data and use artificial intelligence to analyse it. For me, it is nice thinking, but the fact is, data costs money – to acquire, to store and to analyse. So if you do not know exactly what you are looking for, going for this trial and error method to collect data is going to be painful and costly. If I look at the last 5 years since Industry 4.0 is implemented, there are lot of prototypes and a huge cloud of data collected. But if you talk to someone running an actual factory for years, he will say this IoT or IIoT is fanciful. Real data from real machines has been collected from the 1980s and is super accurate and reliable. So I do not think for us in the industry this is reliable enough or enough of a differentiator, compared to the traditional way of acquiring data. When you talk of IoT for devices, it is fine. But for factories, data collection from machines has been extremely reliable for over forty years.

True, so what is the way out of this maze of contradictory experiences?
At Dassault Systèmes we have a Business Consulting Group with most of them former factory managers and lean manufacturing experts, with say, 10 years of experience on the shop floor, managing people and machines. This is the team that visits the factories to help them refine the roadmap for implementation, and this is what I was trying to explain during the presentation. You can do a lot of things – the budget is limited and so is the timeline for delivery, so that people start believing in the solution. You have just 3-6 months to start showing them there is something useful for the factory, otherwise they will say this is another scam! In manufacturing, you have to be extremely practical – where you have the industrial pain, focus on that and solve it, go to the next. What we do a lot with early customers, is try to define the steps, create a meaningful roadmap – 2, 3 or 5 years – depending on their capacity to invest and transform. This is where we bring a lot of value; we have a lot of experience with this team now with the system operating in over 1500 factories all over the world. Members of this team visit about 50 different factories in a year! So the experience and knowledge of this team is extremely valuable.
   
Another point is customer acquisition, where Dassault Systèmes is being choosy. How does this work?

Right now looking at the Indian market we have to apply the strategy of being selective because we do not have a very wide coverage of the country and our manufacturing team is limited. So we cannot follow all prospects, but instead do an analysis of return on investment, because when we engage, it costs us a certain number of months with certain number of people, and the question is do we invest this kind of time and effort on this customer vs that one? Also it is very important to first see the factory to assess if they have a real problem that we can solve. The other thing is, we are looking at the people responsible for the operations– whether they are tough enough to go to their board and insist and get the necessary budget, because it is not easy to justify it for such transformation effort not knowing whether it will succeed or not. So we look if the person has the necessary experience and strong belief to go ahead with the project with us and convince the management. Like the person who spoke this morning for the engineering company, who comes with years of experience in the automobile industry and has the capability to change things.

One final point – what is the result of the two ‘3DEXPERIENCE on Wheels’ campaigns launched in India earlier this year?
Both these campaigns have been highly successful and have been extended beyond the scheduled run of 12-14 weeks by another two months. The campaign has reached more than 3500 people visiting the truck at various clusters, and this is enormous. We will probably have the campaign again next year, and with more trucks!