Smart factories or connected factories are tech-enabled manufacturing solutions that offer a simplified synchronization of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) elements. However, smart factory connectivity is more than just linking systems and people, it is more about improved clarity across the manufacturing units of a company, which leads to real-time visibility, seamless collaboration, and maximum scalability.
In an exclusive conversation with CORE Media, one of India’s Senior CIOs and Industry Stalwarts –Rajesh Uppal, Member Executive Board (IT, HR, DE & Safety) and CIO, Maruti Suzuki, shared his views on how converged technology can play an important role in solving the challenges caused by the siloed relationship between the IT-OT, and accelerate a company’s transformation journey.
The grey space between IT and OT can only be bridged by technology. While integrating the two can be challenging, manufacturing companies can reap the benefits of automation and business intelligence through a unified and streamlined system that ensures also security to a large extent. What’s your view?
Uppal: In today's environment, the whole business cycle is becoming digital. So right from a customer requirement to the manufacturing, it needs to be seamlessly integrated so that you can serve the customer's need. That’s where there is a need for connecting IT and OT to ensure that you work seamlessly and efficiently for the right customer requirement; it is a very critical element in any manufacturing company.
So, this kind of integration can rebuild a lot of benefits in building the right product for the customer with the right quality, the right specification, and the right time, and so on and so forth. This integration is almost like hygiene in today’s digital space, and to enable this, you need a very solid platform, which connects IT with the OT infrastructure of the company. It also has to be 24*7 and secure. So, for efficiencies and effectiveness, and for the right customer demand, I think this integration is almost hygiene in any company's factory.
What are the typical challenges/obstacles faced by manufacturers in the integration process? How did you solve these challenges?
Uppal: For me, this journey is not new. This journey started almost 20 years back and has continued till date. The typical challenges are:
#1 Maturity of the Two Systems: The IT systems are always getting upgraded, and the software infrastructure and the versions always get updated regularly but it’s not the same with OT. So, there are different levels of opportunities.
#2 Infrastructure Upgrade: In the plants or factories, the infrastructure is of various ages. Some are bought recently, some are new. So, it becomes different kinds of interfaces and somewhere it is not interfaceable to the IT environment.
#3 IT-OT Mindset: Third important element is for people to visualize – the kind of business value this integration creates. So, the whole mindset is related to the capability part.
#4 Technology & Delivery: I link technology with the capability of your service providers to ensure that you do a seamless integration through the capital delivered. It is a very critical infrastructure and if you do not do it properly, not with the right kind of security inbuilt or throughput done, it can be very challenging. So, to solve this, we need the right kind of talent and technology.
#5 Security: How we manage security around this infrastructure with systems of different maturity levels is a challenge.
How manufacturers can create a balanced ecosystem to make IT-OT synchronization successful? Do you have any thoughts/ use cases to share?
Uppal: The company needs to have the right kind of technology architecture to deploy this. There has to be clarity about - what are the entry points, what kind of technology you're putting in, what kind of firewalls you're putting in, and how you connect it all to technology. Secondly, setting up a business goal is important - why do you want to do this integration, how do you measure the success of this, and how do you really see to it that the investment has the right kind of ROI ? To set goals in the organization, it is important to ensure that you prepare all the partners in the system, whether it is the shop floor management or the top management.
We have some use cases in energy management, where we were able to draw huge savings by monitoring and saving energy on the shop floor. We worked on a lot of predictive maintenance use cases, where instead of doing some maintenance on a periodic basis or timely basis, we did it on IoT basis to spot and correct errors and replace the infrastructure. I think there are multiple use cases, which we have established in the company - from which vehicle is made for which customer, at which location or interface to having the right quality to predict failures in the shop floor energy management. So, we identified around maybe five-six different kinds of use cases where we are trying to implement and get value from each of the investments we are making.
With manufacturing processes becoming more and more digitally connected, when can smart factories reach their full potential? What does the innovation roadmap look like at Maruti Suzuki?
Uppal: A smart factory initiative is a journey and there are various parameters that we look at. Ultimately, our objective is to create a digital twin of the factory. This way, we can simulate and see how the plant is running, where are the red flags, and so on. We are sort of creating a product approach. We are creating a product for each kind of application for energy monitoring or operation parameter monitoring. We create a product on one side of the factory and urgently deploy it at various locations in the plant. We can evaluate the deployment on simulations. Also, these are cloud-based infrastructures, supported by right-edge infrastructure, so expanding them horizontally is easy and decisions can be made in real-time. We can have data on the backend to map trends and build predictions on the system. Going forward, these products could be rolled out to our partner ecosystem, our suppliers, and joint venture companies, so the investment could be realized by multiple use cases.
Closing views
In Uppal’s view, digital technologies have become a reality; and can be productized now. There is awareness and need about how these can add value to the business and create a higher level of efficiency and maturity on the shop floor. “The cost has to be made available to the industry by the service provider so we can easily calculate return on investments in the pay-per-use context. We can create those kinds of business models in manufacturing and take them to the next level. Both awareness and the delivery ecosystem can enable this in the industry,” he concluded.
