The smart factory

“Taking the leap towards an Automated Future”

The convergence of the digital and physical worlds enclosing information technology and operations technology has begun to rapidly transform industries towards endless possibilities maximizing potential, improving performance resulting in greater profitability.

The following capabilities integrate to enable the act of production. This integration signifies the opportunity to drive greater value both within the four walls of the factory and across the supply network.

• Connected: -a connectednature is required for the underlying processes and materials to be connected to generate the data necessary to make real-time decisions.
• Optimized: -optimizing to allow operations to be executed with minimal manual intervention and high reliability. The automated workflows, synchronization of assets, improved tracking and scheduling, and optimized energy consumption inherent in the smart factory can increase yield, uptime, and quality, as well as reduce costs and waste.
• Transparent: - Real-time data visualizations can transform data captured from processes and fielded or still-in-productionproducts and convert them into actionable insights, either for humans or autonomous decision making. A transparent network can enable greater visibility across the facility and ensure that the organization can make more accurate decisions by providing tools such as role-based views, real-time alerts and notifications, and real-time tracking and monitoring.
• Proactive: - employees and systems can anticipate and act before issues or challenges arise, rather than simply reacting to them after they occur. This feature can include identifying anomalies, restocking and replenishing inventory, identifying and predictively addressing quality issuesand monitoring safety and maintenance concerns.
• Agile: - flexibility allows the factory to adapt to schedule and product changes with minimal intervention. Advanced smart factories can also self-configure the equipment and material flows depending on the product being built and schedule changes, and then see the impact of those changes in real time. Additionally, agility can increase factory uptime and yield by minimizing changeovers due to scheduling or product changes and enables flexible scheduling.

Anautomateddoes not mean complete elimination of skilled workforce. Despite automation a human work force is expected to carry out operations. Automating a factory may have changes in operations which may result in a realignment of roles to support new processes and capabilities which may eliminate a human element in certain sectors which do not require logical capabilities. However new roles requiring new capabilities such as virtual/augmented reality and data visualization will likely emerge. Managing changes to people and processes will require an agile, adaptive change management plan. Organizational change management will play an important role in the industry going forward. “Soon an industry will either adapt or get left behind…”