Smart technologies for Manufacturing Firms to Succeed

Smart technologies for Manufacturing Firms to Succeed

Manufacturing Technology Insights | Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Smart production is a powerful, disturbing force, capable of restructuring the current competitive environment and producing many new market leaders. Slow-moving companies could be left behind in adopting new technology and processes. In the last couple of years, a conversation between industry experts, strategists and thinkers have been the focus of smart production. Despite its media coverage, however, many on the front lines of production are not quite sure what smart manufacturing means or why it is even relevant to their company.

Intelligent production is all about data processing; data says “what to do” and “when to do.” Smart manufacturing facilities, cybersecurity, in particular, will play a vital and significant role throughout the smart manufacturing ecosystem. Data security is a significant challenge for the implementation of these facilitators.

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The manufacturing firms can connect their machines through the use of sensors and communication skills and improved IIoT technologies to and from their networks, especially when IoT devices are cheaper to buy and more comfortable to deploy. All industrial machinery and parts are embedded or connected to sensors that generate the relevant data. This is also transferred via data communication systems to the cloud/software systems. This enormous amount of data has a lot of insight that can help in the identification of some dark regions in the production process when analyzed. Following the analysis of the data, any corrective action is transmitted as feedback to the production systems.

Today, the AI deployments are common everywhere; but, applications in ecosystems are now being developed. Over the last six years, interest and investment in AI in manufacturing have increased tremendously. The main reason is that AI will only function if the data is available and the necessary ability to generate large amounts of data using low-cost sensors and store data in cheap systems and processing data at an affordable price is only recently establishing itself.

One common misconception about smart manufacturing is that companies need to transform their present operations dramatically and invest in advanced technology that is too complex to adapt to. Although some changes are necessary, smart technologies make this transition considerably simpler by building on the capabilities manufacturers currently have. The culture of the company and the commitment of the team members play a significant role in a firm’s success. It is necessary to recall that all technology integration and use is unnecessary if it is combined with employees who do not understand precisely how it will simplify their work and not make it difficult.

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