India’s manufacturing sector is increasingly investing in plant level automation and manufacturing information technology solutions for gaining sustainable competitiveness, says Rajabahadur V Arcot.
A decade ago the Indian manufacturing sector was still in its infancy. But manufacturing has come a long way since then. Manufacturing started with process industries, such as cement, chemicals, electric power, and metals which played a crucial role during initial growth phase of the Indian economy. With the growth of the Indian economy gaining momentum, disposable incomes in the hands of people expanded thus spurring the growth of the discrete industry, such as automotive, consumer electronics, and white goods.
The main challenge during the initial years when the manufacturing industry was establishing itself in the country was mainly related in the industry acquiring the knowhow and manufacturing skills. The manufacturing industry operated in a sellers’ market and customers did not really have a choice and price was based on cost plus profit. The pressure on the industry to automate for gaining productivity improvements, ensuring product quality and consistency, and supply chain efficiencies did not exist. After the integration of the Indian economy with the global markets, things have changed dramatically. Manufacturers are slowly learning that they will survive only when they are truly competitive. They are beginning to realize that market determines the price and their profits are to be earned by managing costs. Resulting from these dramatic changes, manufacturers are investing in automation. This trend, aided further by increasing challenges on the human resource front and escalating energy costs, is bound to gather further momentum in the years to come.
The future of the Indian economy depends largely on the ability of the manufacturing industry’s growth. A large segment of the population still lives in villages and depends on agriculture for living. The further impetus for the economic growth of the country would come from the success of the manufacturing industry to wean away people from the agriculture sector and provide gainful employment for them. And when things start moving in that direction, India would emerge as a manufacturing hub. Somewhere along that path, manufacturing will begin to seek continuous productivity improvements. This in turn would propel manufacturing to deploy automation more extensively. The beginning has to be with the plant-level real-time automation and its integration with enterprise-level transaction oriented solutions. While plant level automation would help manufacturers to achieve shop floor productivity and enterprise solutions will tone up the business transactions, enterprise excellence would be achieved only when it is run on real-time basis. And this calls for integrating real-time automation systems with enterprise transaction decision support solutions.
Although some industries have adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, they find the implementation costs prohibitive and interoperability between existing systems difficult to achieve. A major challenge today with ERP systems is in integrating it with the existing backend legacy systems and plant floor automation systems. A lot of companies have invested in standalone systems. Data required by the execution systems are not able to flow from the plant floor systems into the planning systems, and the responsibility falls onto the user to integrate the systems.
With domestic manufacturing becoming global sized enterprises and global competitive pressures catching up with them, they are beginning to follow the global pattern of increasing investments in automation systems and enterprise solutions. While in the case of global companies automation began at the shop floor level many years ago, in India many companies have already invested in the enterprise solutions. However, they are still lagging behind in increasing their automation spending. Many companies are still saddled with obsolete automation systems, but things are likely to change as manufacturers realize the benefits of automation.
Automation has been continually reinventing itself and has always been in the forefront in leveraging the technological developments. I would say that automation has been the first to make the full use of the power of computing and communication technologies. Since then it has always exploited every commercially available technology but without compromising on security. It has moved away from pneumatic signal transmission to electrical, and now is exploiting the wireless technologies. In the near future, which is of relevance to industry, the industry trend would be to adopt unified architecture for process, discrete and batch processes on one side and on the other unifying the communication protocols which would facilitate integration of automation systems with enterprise solutions. There is a strong impetus for developing an architecture which would allow disparate systems at the plant levels to integrate seamlessly with enterprise solutions at the transaction level and along the supply chain axis.
