Industrial Automation Magazine India

Digitisation will be the driving force towards Industry 4.0

Published on : Wednesday 09-10-2019

What is driving the fourth industrial revolution?
With increasing size of the Indian market, manufacturing companies are now focussing on bringing innovative practices to maintain their leadership position. As data and digitisation are at the helm of these new-age technological solutions, digital collaborations are more mature than ever before. These are based on the convergence of multiple technologies such as IIoT, Machine Learning, AI, Cloud Computing, Analysis of Big-Data, creating a robust digital infrastructure. Industrial revolution on the back of digitalisation is becoming more important as enterprises are witnessing increased efficiency, cost-optimisation and development of unique products for their discerning customers.

How is India preparing for Industry 4.0 and what sectors likely to be impacted by the present trend?
Adoption of advanced digital technologies in India is still in developing stage. In today’s world, information and communication technologies are key to unlocking opportunities. India has many influencing factors including a large and dynamic market, a huge workforce, regional diversity, pool of scientists and engineers, over 1,000 R&D centres of top global multinationals, base of world’s second-largest technology start-up companies and a conducive government policy environment like Make in India. These have the potential to propel the growth of India’s industrial output. And, the early adopters of this movement are automobile, power, oil & gas, steel, FMCG, telecom sectors which will see transformational growth in the recent future.

What are the smarter strategies India should adopt for smart manufacturing?
In the recent budget, the government has announced the roll-out of a new manufacturing policy to push its share to 25% of GDP by consolidating Make in India and embracing Industrial Revolution 4.0. Adoption of this policy is expected to give a huge boost to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that manufacture products such as sensors, actuators, devices, communication systems in digitisation and new tech. Presently, India needs to develop the requisite digital ecosystem, enhance market opportunities, fast-tracked digitisation in the 21st century, bridge the skill gaps and create jobs for professionals entering into the job market.

What strategies should Indian firms adopt to move towards Industry 4.0?
Keeping in mind that digitisation will be the driving force towards Fourth Industrial Revolution – manufacturers should appoint chief innovation officer, acquire new technological capabilities, develop new products with pioneering features, and collaborate with the organisation with similar goals and strategy.

What are the benefits of 4.0 and the challenges industry will face?
In today’s competitive world with a huge demand for customised products at a reasonable price with the best quality, innovation and enhanced capability have become imperative to full-fill companies’ order book. Hence, to meet the market demand many large-scale manufacturing units have started investing in advanced technology to transform their traditional factories into smart-connected factories. Some of the key issues, Indian industrial sectors facing are physical and digital infrastructure, skill gaps, data security and privacy. Today’s need is to engage skilled workforce in new business models leveraging the 21st- century digital manufacturing revolution and reap the benefits of enhanced competitiveness.

What is the future of Industry 4.0, Smart Manufacturing and Automation in the Indian scenario?  

Huge efficiency and productivity gains are being realised through cost optimisation, quality enhancements, customisation and a significant boost in performance. Increasing investment in these technologies is propelling traditional manufacturing powerhouses of the 21st century back to the top of the competition.

How is your company gearing up for Industry 4.0?
Our Industry 4.0 solutions have helped companies build digital infrastructure from connectivity to device management to application software to any form of analytics. Unlimit Ocupro, Unlimit Intellifactory, Unlimit Solar, Unlimit AssetPro are some of our IIoT products and solutions, we have built with a deep understanding of the industry. Unlimit’s offerings are an edge over the rest in this field because we make customised IIoT solution based on the business logic of the company, our end-to-end IoT solutions are box ready technology, which can be customised based on the use case for rapid implementation. We believe our readily available end-to-end IIoT solutions could help our customers drive complex operations smarter and take faster business decisions to minimise the risk and input cost.

How can SMEs face the challenges of Industry 4.0 – any suggestions and advice?
India must embrace Industry 4.0 as we have just started making inroads in the manufacturing and other sectors. To leverage the best that technology has to offer us, we need to focus on upskilling workers and millennials in these fields and create more jobs. The fourth industrial revolution will enable us to use a huge amount of data to improve our product life-cycle, customer experience and quality of services.

What is the end goal according to you?
Transform day-to-day operations of conventional industries in India.

Pradeep Sreedharan is a telecommunications industry leader, having worked for more than two decades in conceptualising, planning and executing transformational strategy and new businesses in different global markets.

On Nov 2016 Pradeep joined as the Vice President – IoT Business of Unlimit, a dedicated IoT business unit under the Reliance Group, based in Mumbai. He is involved in strategising and building the sales channels, set the entire process, tools and people to run Finance, Human Resources, Procurement, Legal and Regulatory.