Industrial Automation Asia, Singapore: Cognizant’s Head of Innovation for Manufacturing and Logistics Says Asian Manufacturers Must Leverage Digital to Future-Proof Their Businesses
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“By integrating the best of the physical and digital worlds, and getting rid of their traditional approaches to maintaining competitiveness, Asian manufacturers can fully capture the benefits of digital,” writes Prasad Satyavolu. Excerpts:
“Three old ways of thinking must be rooted out. These include being reluctant to invest strategically in digital, fearing automation, and not understanding the importance of securing data effectively.
Spend money to make money: For long, Asian manufacturers have focused on maintaining cost competitiveness by using inexpensive labor, and failed to recognize the numerous opportunities available to better operations in a digital economy. Elements in the manufacturing process such as design, planning and engineering were implemented in silos. Today, through digital manufacturing and forces such as 3D printing, IoT sensors and manufacturing robots, there are opportunities to seamlessly integrate these processes.
To do this, manufacturers need to double down on digital and adopt a digital manufacturing strategy. The benefits of doing so are clear. Cognizant’s recent study showed that manufacturers investing in digital strategies have already seen a 5.4% improvement in revenue. What’s more, these manufacturers expect the growth in revenue to soar to 9% over the course of the next year.
By developing smarter and more agile demand-driven supply chains, manufacturers can hope to generate growth rates well above what they would have enjoyed in the pre-digital era.
Harnessing the potential of digitalization: Today, digital tools help us work faster and as the world moves towards automation, the onus is on humans to find ways to work even smarter with the aid of technology.
Manufacturers believe that as future tasks become more automated, greater technical expertise will be required, and the talent and skills required will undergo significant change. This means that workers will not be replaced by machines, but will simply need to develop higher-value skill sets.
Increasingly, manufacturers need to turn their business inside out in order to adapt and respond to demand volatility and business pressures. Manufacturers need to become digital at their core. This will enable them to integrate and deliver better outcomes for all the key players across the manufacturing value chain.
As digital spurs the need for new skills, manufacturers in Asia should upskill their workers, focusing on developing and capitalizing on the capabilities that are uniquely human and cannot be replicated by machines.
Watch out for “data spills”: Oil spills are considered one of the worst disasters because of the wide-reaching impact they have on countries, communities, corporations and the environment. The digital equivalent of an oil spill is a “data spill” or any sort of cybersecurity breach. It is no surprise then that with so much data swirling around, 90% of manufacturers are concerned about the security and privacy risks of information getting into the wrong hands.
Regardless of the product being made, Asian manufacturers need a robust data security strategy in place to secure their systems. They also need to be resilient and should be able to quickly mitigate the damage.
Business leaders should adopt a proactive stance toward cybersecurity. When it comes to planning for digital manufacturing, security issues must be addressed upfront, rather than as follow-on tasks.
By leveraging digital to improve quality, productivity and delivery, Asian manufacturers can future-proof their businesses and maintain the region’s standing as a leader in the sector.”
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