Industry Update, Australia: Cognizant’s Assistant Vice President of Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy and Utilities Consulting Says Transforming Plant Operations is Key for Manufacturers to Drive Differentiation
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“Plant operations are a critical lever for addressing the emerging business technology challenges,” writes Badrinath Setlur. “Manufacturing plants need to collaborate seamlessly and efficiently with other facilities as well as supply chain and innovation partners. However, many manufacturing operations are still largely disconnected, non-harmonized, non-standardized and run on legacy systems with limited appetite and budget to adopt new technologies. The situation calls for a comprehensive approach to transforming plant operations management to develop capabilities for sustainability and growth.” Excerpts:
“Manufacturers need to bring customer intelligence to the production floor and drive real-time and predictive intelligence from disparate information collected from supply chain and production processes. This presents opportunities for manufacturers to re-examine their operating models and apply new technologies that have emerged in the areas of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT). For instance, mobile technologies are providing real-time access to business-critical information to empower and enable operational personnel to make faster decisions. The rapidly changing mobile landscape of IP-addressable and IP-aware devices can enable manufacturers to capitalize on the intelligence gained from every interaction and transaction across the value chain.
The convergence of operational technologies on the plant floor with enterprise information systems, forming a single architecture, will help manufacturers improve the information flow between operations and the enterprise, thereby facilitating new operational efficiencies. Alignment between the two systems will allow process data to integrate with plant and enterprise analytics, and help manufacturers with event-based capabilities to respond to adverse events within the plant or supply chain.
Smart sensors with IoT platforms will generate enormous amount of data around products, people, processes and organizations—what we call “Code Halos”. Plant Code Halo could be harnessed by using big data analytics to obtain real-time predictive and actionable intelligence for the plant, thereby avoiding costly breakdowns and getting critical insights to improve batch yields.
With increased focus on agility, responsiveness and customised manufacturing, plant operations need to be tightly integrated, predictive, lean, and agile and work collaboratively as a “one-plant” ecosystem. Key capabilities include real-time and predictive analytics to improve visibility, pre-empt failure, enhance resource utilisation and achieve predictable performance. Other areas include reduction in manufacturing and innovation cycle time, and collaborative approaches to share best practices across the plant. These can result in higher customer satisfaction through right product delivery at the right time, optimised resources, reduced waste, and improved regulatory compliance.
Manufacturers need a transformation framework that can enable them to achieve an integrated enterprise by strategically aligning technology, processes, and people towards a common vision and goal. Its key components must include a maturity framework to assess the current state and define the transformation roadmap with strategic actions, along with technology services and agile methodology to transform the plant operations management in alignment with the transformation roadmap.
The strategic actions that the transformation framework must address include: Simplify and standardise plant operations management processes. Improve user experience. Adopt new technology. Integrate processes and enable plants with manufacturing SOA. Enable remote operations management: This can help reduce overall TCO of maintaining operations. Improve collaboration and best practice utilisation. Build predictive and real time operations intelligence.
Plants of the future will be seamlessly integrated with the extended supply chain, operating with greater agility and efficiency. Plants will work as a single ecosystem to fulfil customer requirements. Plant information will be available on the go and operations will be agile to adjust to adverse events within the supply chain. SMAC technologies will become an integral part of operations technologies, aiding predictive intelligence and driving proactive action. Everyone from plant managers to senior leaders will share information and access analytics to improve operational efficiencies. Transforming plant operations management is key to driving differentiation and rising up to the needs of tomorrow.”
Click below to read the article, first published in Industry Update, Australia’s leading publication for the manufacturing sector.
