The industry experts and mentors who shared their knowledge and solutions in the session included Vishwajeet Abhyankar, Vice President of Piramal Glass Pvt. Ltd; Amit Saluja, Head at NASSCOM; Hamseswari Ranganathan, Product Strategist at Oracle and Dr. Chandan Chowdhary, Senior Associate and Professor at Indian School of Business (ISB).
Vishwajeet Piramal, began the session on ‘Data Acquisition and Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) analysis’ and said that improving OEE means reducing availability loss, performance loss, quality loss and scheduled loss in the manufacturing of the products. This can be achieved by adopting advanced technology in data acquisition which clearly helps to reduce losses and prioritise corrective actions. For instance, wireless technology like tablets installed on the shopfloor and machines with predefined dropdown menus, AI-based automatic inspection machines for detecting defects can help minimise losses in a huge way.
The challenges in a technology-driven data acquisition however can be additional cyber security measures for data protection, incompatibility of the existing equipment to connect with the new platform and need for talent with a special digital skill-set.
Amit Saluja, guided the participants to follow a four-step process for achieving OEE by assessing the operational challenges in their manufacturing plants, making cost assessments during various steps of product manufacturing process and assessing long term growth objectives for which they will need digitalisation, and then finding out how similar companies have digitised their units and learning from them.
Then, Hamseswari Ranganathan took the session ahead by providing beneficial insights on ‘Paperless Operations and Shop-floor Digitalisation’ while stressing the fact that every SME is unique, with unique manufacturing products, processes and challenges. The approach in digitalising each SME would thus be different. She gave clarity into the differences between digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation, where digital transformation is the final stage of digital journey. While digitalisation means gaining useful insights from the digitised data, digital transformation starts when the organisations undergo behavioural changes in the way businesses run with improved processes.
However, the solutions on digitally transforming manufacturing processes is not complete without taking a global and national view of the MSMEs and SMEs. Dr. Chandan Chowdhary of ISB focused on this area during his session on ‘Transformation for Innovation and Accelerating Growth’. Chowdhary emphasised that Indian SMEs suffer from 3 challenges; productivity, market access and scaling up. They also need to bear in mind global challenges of environmental sustainability, economic instability, deglobalisation and geopolitical changeshave while trying to compete globally.In such a scenario, digital continuity can be achieved by maintaining connectedness with customers, continuously bringing new marketing models and by enhancing productivity. For this, the SMEs should also avail the benefit from the relevant government schemes for their businesses, as there are 767 government schemes supporting MSMEs in digitalisation in various areas.
All the speakers stressed the participants for moving towards leveraging digital technology for production and overall growth of the company.
The next week of the ET’s Digital Transformation for Manufacturing Course features Amit Kale, Associate Vice President, Sourcing and Supply Chain, Reliance Retail and Suyog Joshi, Founder, Neewee sharing their thoughts on the theme of ‘Production Planning and Scheduling.’ In another session on the theme of ‘Predictive Maintenance and Industrial IoT Solutions’ Prasad Sant, Industry Expert – Industrial IoT and Avinash Manerahimatpurkar, CEO, Resonating Mindz.
For more information about the program, visit the website.
