Here are four areas that manufacturers should keep in mind in order to meet Industry 4.0 objectives:
Generating data: Production in today's time comes equipped with a large number of sensors that create data. Sensor data, ERP, maintenance management data, and financial data together create ‘magic'. For example, if you get data from a vibration sensor alone, what you get is pure technical information.
But if you combine this with data from the maintenance management system, you will be able to link that vibration pattern to performed or missing maintenance activities or specific parts that have been changed. This helps in tracking the actual root cause of an issue and make predictions as to what might happen. Adding the financial data enables prediction of costs of future maintenance activities that may arise due to specific vibration patterns.
Transferring data: In manufacturing environments, data is generated in geographically discrete production sites, in OEM equipment in remote locations, and sometimes even in handsets. As data transfer is costly, manufacturers need a strategy, so it can be decided as to what kind of data needs to be transferred and when.
Storing data: A huge amount of data is acquired, not all of which is useful. Manufacturers need to make decisions on suitable storage technology and also decide which data is needed when, where, and how, as the cost of storage is affected by these factors.
Getting insights from data: How can data be analysed to drive better decisions? The value of data to the business is essentially linked to saving costs or increasing efficiency through improvements in a production process, a maintenance procedure, or system behaviour.
For Industry 4.0 project to be successful, engineers and IT professionals need to work together. IT has to be prepared to go much deeper in forging new partnerships with their engineering counterparts, while respecting established processes. This will serve as a great opportunity for engineers and IT to come together to deliver on the Industry 4.0 vision.
From an India perspective, Indian manufacturing sector is starting to realise the importance of data and analytics, there is a great deal of priority being given to start capturing new data across processes and augment where it was already being done with relevant updates. Some organisations are even starting to see investments in data and analytics not as an IT project but more of business improvement opportunities in order to be locally and globally competitive.
The author is Managing Director, Teradata India.
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