Roadmap towards Digital Transformation

90% of efforts and investment in digital transformation will be wasted if the right approach towards technology adoption is not taken.

The Story

Shina San was hired as Innovation head at leading manufacturing industry with an intention to build a digital culture in shop floor and transform entire shop floor digitally.

The shop floor comprised on multiple lines stages covering a complete value chain with 1000s of machines. Shina San, read few articles on MES and Industry 4.0 and formed a CFT with Process Engineering, Quality, Production and Maintenance team members.

Multiple round of discussion was done a the Project related to establishing end to end traceability was taken and was proposed to management and necessary approvals were taken.

The joint assessment was done of shop floor infrastructure and below were the findings:

• 80% machines were of same brand but the controllers of the machines were from different OEMs.
• For material already a robust ERP system was already there.
• CTA established was to call all the controller makers and discuss on OT-IT integration to monitor real time data and park the entire data at a local server for monitoring.

In short all the budget approvals taken and implementations done. But, Do you know what was the outcome?

• All the machines were connected, but with different architectures.
• Real time Data and Business insights was available but at different silos as every controller OEM had their own way of deploying the things.
• At shop floor, still digital culture was not evident.
• Innovation was there but for high skilled people who can extract and analyse the date collected.
• More recruitments were done to extract data, connect data from different silos and make it a aggregated traceability analytics.

In short millions were spent but the essence of digital transformation and technology adoption was not evident. There's a famous quote:

At least 40% of business will die in next few years, If they do not figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies - Bill Gates.

Now, What should be the right approach towards digital transformation in manufacturing set-up which not only provides real time data in single silo but also create digital culture from top grass to bottom grass.

There are 5 steps to achieve this, can be understood from the below pictorial representation.

Step-1: Digitisation

Almost 65% of shop floor data is still lying on papers which goes unrealised.

Production reports (DPRs), Quality audits, Safety audits, Breakdown slips, 4M changes, production plans, CAPA analysis and many more are still being executed on papers and whenever there is any quality or safety incidence happens, everyone runs to record rooms and struggles to trace the actual data. This is turn is a huge containment cost which multiples to inventory cost, segregation cost and accounts to hidden cost of poor quality.

The first step is to digitise all paper based systems to get the most important data at real time disposal for analysis.

Benefits of following Step-1:

• 65% of data is captured in phase-1.
• Created digital culture at all levels quickly.
• Most cost effective and ROIs are achieved within 3 months of implementation.
• Manpower saving - No separate resource needed to punch data and create MIS. Everything is real time.
• Reduces Mean Time to Act (MTTA).
• Infra Saving - No record rooms required for storing the papers.
• Immediate saving on Carbon footprints.

Step -2 & 3: Digitalisation

IIoT is a buzz word and most demanded but at the same time true realisation of connected things happens once Step-1 is achieved.

Once the step-1 is achieved, then only it will be realised on to where actually or what things are required to be connected.

Not everything is needed to be connected, only the right ones.

The benefits of implementing Step-2&3:

• Cost impact will be much lesser during implementation.
• The data frequency will increase as most of the data will be automated.
• Further reduction in MTTA.
• ROIs will be quick.
• Meaningful and authentic predictive insights as lot's of data is already been captured.

Step-4 & 5: Digital Transformation

Now that 100% data is available to be realised, next step comes connectivity of data to establish end to end traceability analytics.

Through this approach not only When and How will be realised but another level of Who and What will also be achieved. It will provide a seamless real time and historical data for all the manufacturing elements of the product which is Man, Machine, Material and Method.

Once all the levels are achieved, one can implement every cutting edge technology over the collected data like conversational AI, Machine learnings, Digital twins etc and create benchmark of digital transformation.

Final question arises, how to select right technology or tool or product which enables journey of digital transformation from Step 1 to Step 5.

Guide for Selecting right technology

• Product which created windows not walls: Understanding that manufacturing companies might have already invested on tech tools for digital transformation, the selection of the product should be such that it can communicate with existing implementations and provide better realisation on investments done.
• Product which can handle shop floor dynamism: The processes in shop floor are pretty dynamic i.e. the method, man, material, machines tends to change and instead of going towards software development, product should be selected in such a way which had lot of DIY functionalities to cater to these dynamisms.
• Product which promotes one factory one application: Since the data is available in different silos, it becomes very cumbersome for users to collect the data using multiple logins. Therefore, selection of product should be done in such a way that it can pull data from all silos into single login and create Single source of truth (S-SOT).
• Product with unified connectivity architecture: As stated earlier, manufacturing shop floor has various controller of different OEMs, it is neither commercially justified nor user friendly to maintain and monitor various architectures, Therefore, the product should be selected in such a way that it has unified architecture which will save a lot of cost on connecting the things.

At the end Shina San, invested in the right product which also compensated on earlier investments, created digital culture and transformed the factory.

TS