How to Accelerate Factory Production with Smart Manufacturing

Since the start of 2020, the industrial, as well as manufacturing sections, have been rolling from the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. Factories fought to handle production because of forced lockdowns, strict safety regulations and the consequent shortage of workforce.  The focus of each industrial revolution has been improving the productivity of production systems. Integrating data generated via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and data analytics creates a new set of abilities such as predictive maintenance and quality.

Enabled by smart manufacturing, these new abilities are transforming the way we do and look at our business, supporting realizing patterns and estimating failures or product quality concerns before they occur. As of August 2020, 38% of manufacturers had stopped their smart factory investments as they evaluated the influence of the economic constraints caused by COVID-19.

Smart manufacturing accelerates factory production with the help of the following dynamics:

How Data Drives Smart Manufacturing

Smart manufacturing enables factory managers to automatically gather and monitor data to make better-informed decisions and optimize production.

• The data from sensors and machines are interacted to the Cloud by IoT connectivity solutions employed at the factory level.
• These data are monitored and integrated with context data and then shared with authorized shareholders.

IoT technology, utilizing both wired and wireless connectivity, yields this flow of data and offers the capability to analyze and manage processes remotely and change production plans rapidly, in real-time when required. It rapidly improves manufacturing end results, minimizing waste, accelerating production and improving yield as well as the quality of products produced. Data analysis will assist in making the production process more structured, transparent and flexible.

Automated Guided Vehicles

A key aspect of manufacturing and the industrial sector is logistics. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) as well as drones allow quick, structured deliveries and significantly minimize dependence on humans for inter-plant or intra-plant logistics. Further, these vehicles can be reprogrammed for several routes, speeds, etc., as per requirement, making them a more flexible option for transportation. AGVs and drones have now become the desired solutions in warehousing and distribution centers to boost overall productivity.

Asset Management and Predictive Maintenance: a matter of Efficiency

The efficiency, as well as optimization of assets today, is generally about production ability and a real-time synopsis of the performance of equipment, view on the production process and an identification of where operating assets and finished goods are with the goal of real-time adjustments in, for example, scheduling, production planning as well as predictive maintenance.

Still, that needs to not just make asset management and tracking more structured but most of all to look at current ways of working, processes as well as asset utilization and insights in new ways and from various angles – with data and analytics as a discriminator.

Predictive maintenance allows the ability to recognize performance, breakdown and operating conditions of equipment or machine on a real-time basis. Here the main goal is to estimate the maintenance actions that will be needed at some point in the future. It is a perspective based on condition monitoring integrated with an effective predictive model for failure modes. This has the benefits of optimizing maintenance to both the machine’s life and the factory’s production planning, even though it does need a more complex overall system.

Predictive maintenance allows corrective maintenance to be scheduled at a convenient time while improving the equipment’s life by intercepting future equipment failures. With the awareness of when machines require to be serviced, maintenance work can be planned accordingly with the parts ready. This perspective removes unplanned line stops and minimizes overall production stoppage time. Additionally improving the factory uptime and equipment lifetimes which will automatically accelerate the factory production.

The Importance of Industrial and Collaborative robots

Previously the robots were programmed to do only one single task at a time. To perform another task you need to change the code. Now robots are well attached to the sensor network implemented within the manufacturing plant and they gain the data from sensors and alter their action accordingly. Artificial intelligence is also being steadily implemented in robotics systems hence thus it makes systems autonomous. At present, most industrial robots are implemented in the Asia-Pacific region.

Aside from industrial robots, there is another type of robot which is rising and is known as collaborative robots. Cobots are developed to operate in a shared workspace with humans. Further, the advancement in collaborative robots has reached such an extent that it would be hard to distinguish them from industrial robots without considering their application. Cobots provide flexibility, ease and productivity. They can be simply reprogrammed and quickly deployed to execute repetitive or risky tasks, thereby enabling human workers to undertake safe, skilled tasks.

The Advantages of Digital Twins

Simulation of every new product and process, changes in production setups and their analysis in real time have shown to be useful over time. The digital twin technology allows modeling of product designs, production processes as well as operations. Several abilities, likewise root-cause analysis or what-if analysis provided by the digital twin technology, support industries to work efficiently and better keep their physical assets.

At the same time, it has been capable to keep consistent quality, minimize batch time and enhance source consumption after the implementation of digital twins at 15 % of its production units. The advantages of digital twins involve a potential reduction in time as well as the cost of product development and the removal of unplanned downtime. The increasing adoption of IoT and cloud platforms are improving the adoption of the digital twin.

The financial influence of COVID-19 may currently be hampering investments in smart manufacturing technologies, but their apparent advantages would speed up adoption in the coming years. Smart manufacturing technologies would better enable industries to encounter similar challenges in the future and to assure business continuity as well as improvement in overall product efficiency.

hIoTron smart manufacturing solutions build your manufacturing ecosystem flexible, fast and sturdy. Our Industry 4.0 strategy drives value by gathering real-time data to optimize performance and increase activity in both short and long production runs.