5 Challenges! That will Keep us from becoming Global Manufacturing Hub!

The covid 19 pandemic intensified the supply chain uncertainties, which made many organizations rethink their sourcing strategies.?

Most of the companies are focusing on localising for two-fold reasons-?

• To be closer to the point of use?
• To minimize the risk of disruption.?

In 2020, Indian government launched Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme, to attract large manufacturers to India, in view of global supply chain disruptions caused (and opportunity there on).?

The foundational requirements to realise this ambitious goal of Aatmanirbhar Bharat, is improving ease of doing business and improved policies and rapidly embracing Digital Innovation (viz- Industry4.0, 5G, IoT, etc).?

The Digital Transformation and Industry4.0 will be a backbone for India to rise as Global Manufacturing Hub!

There’s huge willingness for large organisations to adopt the digital innovation, however SME’s and MSME’s are still struggling to adopt the Digital Transformation and Industry4.0 initiatives.?

Here are top 5 Challenges to realise our goal of Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Industry4.0 (for SME's/MSME's)

1. Organisation Culture:

This is one of the largest challenge for any organisation to evolve from taking ad-hoc decisions to Data based decision making.?Part of this is driven by availability of the data and also CXO;s awareness and willingness to adopt to new Digital Technologies. Navigating the balance between the culture and technology together is one of the toughest challenges of digital transformation. [Ref]

2. Data Readiness/Digitization:

Any Digital Revolution thrives on availability of Data. Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest opportunity for SME’s.?

In most of the manufacturing plants at SME’s they are lacking basic data capture and storage infrastructure.?

Most of the places have different protocols of PLC’s (e.g. Siemens, Rockwell, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, etc) and entire data is encrypted and locked.?

This either requires unlocking encryption by the Control systems providers or calls for separate sensor/gateways installations.?

This is huge added cost, and SME's have not seen any benefits so far, as they have been running business frugally.

3. Data Standardisation and Normalisation:

This is a crucial step in Digital Transformation journey, which will enable the data to be used for Realtime visibility, Benchmarking and for machine learning.

As most of the SME’s grow in an organic way and there’s an intent to grow in a most profitable way, typically investments in IT and OT technologies is kept at bare minimum. As a result, most of the SME’s are missing SCADA/MES systems which actually integrate the data in a meaningful way and help store centrally.

As a result of missing these middlewares, most of the data either needs to be sourced from different sensors directly or PLC’s and sent via Gateways.?

All of this data cannot be directly consumed for visualisation, and needs an expensive middleware solution(viz- LIMS (Abott, Thermo Fischer) and LEDS- GE Proficy), this is again an added cost.?

Additionally the operational data is not all stored in a centralised database. Rather, it is available in real time from Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), machine controllers, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and/or time series databases throughout the factory.?

This increases complexity of data acquisition and storage.

4. Lack of Talent for Digital:

Believe it or not, we have been reeling under huge talent crunch for Digital Technologies. As of 2022, there’s a huge talent war which is happening to attract the Digital talent across all levels in Services, Consulting and Product based companies.?

As a result of this, we don’t have enough people who have seen actual physical shop floor and understand day 2 day challenges and enough digital and Technical skills to enable Digital Transformation.?

A systematic approach is needed to help up-skill existing resources and develop new Digital talent across all levels.?

5. CXO Sponsorship:

This is a key foundation for any Digital Transformation and Industry4.0 initiative. Unless there’s a CXO buy-in and sponsorship, any Digital Transformation initiative is bound to fail.?

For CXO’s to start believing in the cause, they need to be onboarded, starting with just awareness of, what’s Possible, emphasising on benefits and ROI and reason to believe.?

Once there’s a top down willingness and drive, things will become much more easier in terms of funding, hiring of technical talent or consulting companies, and execution.?

We would love to hear back from you on your experiences of implementing Industry4.0 and Digital Transformation projects and challenges thereon.?

Please feel free to comment and share your experiences.?

Following @Amit Kurhekar

Read more of my articles on Digital Transformation - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/digital-transformation-learning-journey-amit-kurhekar/