The industry experts and manufacturing leaders who participated in the different sessions during the first week of the course include Samip Mutha, Vice President and Head of Digital and Innovation, RPG Group; Amit Saluja, Senior Director and Centre Head, NASSCOM CoE, Gandhinagar; Shridhar Ravikumar, TUV SUD, Singapore and Shalini Dabholkar, Chief Operating Officer, India SME Accelerator Network.
The session began with the keynote address of Samip Mutha on ‘Digital Transformation and Manufacturing Excellence. Mutha revealed prime factors that SME leaders need to consider before beginning their digital journey. He urged the participants to firstly develop digital literacy, and plan their digital journey with small trails and in accordance to their business needs and challenges. It’s because digitalisation is crucial for the daily operations in manufacturing, and even low-cost digital solutions can scale up these operations hugely.
Moving ahead, in the opening session, Amit Saluja elucidated how digital transformation can make SMEs globally competitive. He explained this by giving a holistic view of the current scenario of irregular digital adoption across the manufacturing sector of India. The uneven adoption is because the large companies have been able to implement digitalisation, the SMEs still lag behind in adopting digital technology due to various problems. The problems include apprehensions in adopting technology, lack of knowledge of when, where and how to start digitalisation and inability to replace automation with digitalisation.
However, Saluja showed participants the way out of these problems by stressing the benefits of digitalisation in comparison to automation. He said while automation merely replaces manual work, digitalisation facilitates interaction between human and machine through data and the usage of advanced technologies like AI and IoT help drive the growth of manufacturing. Various digital solutions like predictive maintenance, smart energy management and OEE monitoring can drastically decrease operational cost and improve plant performance. Realising the importance of digitalisation, the government has also been running initiatives like MeitY supported NASSCOM CoE and UDYAM 4.0 that aid manufacturing SMEs with digital solutions to expedite digitalisation in their plants.
Nevertheless, knowledge about the importance of digitalisation is as important as the practical tips to initiate the digital journey in manufacturing. Shridhar Ravikumar, during his talk on ‘Driving Digitisation in Plant- how to start digital journey using a step-by-step approach’ he shared insights on how entrepreneurs can carry out their digital journey prudently.
He called upon the manufacturing companies to firstly assess their current digital state, and the areas where they can gain maximum and quick benefits by deploying digital solutions. For this the companies can use assessment tools like the Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI) framework, which will help them to identify and focus on such areas. The manufacturing companies can then standardise their processes with process improvement strategy with Lean and Six Sigma. Approaching digital journey in this way can help the manufacturing companies to stay competitive and cope with the challenges.
The next week of the ET’s Digital Transformation for Manufacturing Course features Vishwajeet Abhyankar, Vice-President of Piramal Glass Products and S.P. Sing, Founder of Intelizest sharing their thoughts on the theme of ‘Data Acquisition and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Analysis’. Hamseshwari Ranganathan, Product Strategist, Oracle and Sri Hari, Founder, Factri.AI will talk about ‘Paperless Operations and Shop Floor Digitalisation whereas Dr Chandan Chowdhury, Senior Associates Dean and Professor (Operations management and Information Systems) at Indian School of Business.
For more information about the program, visit the website.
