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Manufacturing Technology Insights | Saturday, October 01, 2022
The manufacturing industry is transforming into smart manufacturing. Different solutions offer a variety of technologies that drive Revolution 4.0.
FREMONT, CA: The advantages of a Smart Factory are numerous and frequently quantifiable. Increasing resource efficiency is at the core of many digitization initiatives. Analyzing data and networking the entire value creation process creates transparency. It improves plant utilization, allows for precise planning, and eliminates scrap and waste. Technology such as automation, self-learning, and predictive analytics can increase productivity or reduce costs. Flexibility is another advantage of a smart factory; it improves delivery performance and strengthens customer orientation, for example, by allowing the economical production of individual products to order in batch sizes as small as one.
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THE BENEFITS OF A SMART FACTORY
Boost productivity and reduce expenses: Increasing productivity remains the primary reason businesses choose a Smart Factory. The benefit of an intelligent factory, increased overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), is the result of several smart factory characteristics:
In the Smart Factory, all operational areas are interconnected through the consistent, end-to-end use of digital planning and control systems, from planning to production and from incoming to outgoing goods. The resultant end-to-end transparency in the value-adding process is a significant benefit of a smart factory: it can reduce lead times, reveal disruptions in the operational process, improve plannability, and thereby ensure increased productivity and lower costs.
The automation of production processes and self-learning, collaborative, and predictive systems are additional benefits of a smart factory. In smart factories, route trains can move autonomously through production halls, and materials can be sorted by robots, allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks, reducing or eliminating (unnoticed) human error. The machine can detect when a worn part is soon to fail or when an error in a production step is likely to result in scrap, thereby avoiding unscheduled downtime and follow-up costs and optimizing delivery performance.
Smart factories, however, benefit not only from the analysis and evaluation of data but also from technologies such as virtual reality. Lean, waste-free processes are a crucial element of successful production. With the aid of data analytics/process mining applications, it is possible to identify bottlenecks and opportunities in the value stream design and optimize, for instance, the factory layout. With minimal effort, virtual reality applications enable the realistic planning of workstations. Factory planning is gradually becoming digital. Emerging as the digital twin of the value stream is the factory.
The increased transparency of production processes makes the smart factory flexible and agile: Planning and implementing changes is easier, and spontaneous customer orders are easier to fulfill. In particular, the production system based on information and communication technologies enables mass customization and generates new customer benefits.
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