Industrial Evolution: The Push For Smarter Manufacturing
How several companies are bringing brains to the brawn of the production line
Nola Lopez
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E-mailWhen a group of CEOs, consultants and policymakers convened at the Detroit Economic Club for a special summit on manufacturing two years ago, a former U.S. Department of Commerce official shared a tale about Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) that resonated with many at the closed-door meeting. A few years back, she said, the automaker was considering spending $1 billion to locate a factory in the southern U.S. But, she continued, its executives at the time worried that the prevailing perception of manufacturing in America — dumb, dirty and in decline — would limit their ability to hire skilled workers.
That was then, this is now: The reality of smart manufacturing directly contradicts the image of factories spewing pollution from smokestacks, while, inside, workers with little training and education perform repetitive tasks. In fact, rather than being defined by the “three Ds,” say executives from Rockwell Automation Inc. (ROK), whose executives attended that meeting, smart manufacturing is becoming even smarter, safer and more sustainable. (Learn how Rockwell is helping companies optimize their processes here.)
In an open letter to industry leaders and policymakers, Rockwell Chief Technology Officer Sujeet Chand and Jim Davis, vice provost of information technology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation grant on Smart Process Manufacturing, lay out a broad definition: “Smart manufacturing marries information, technology and human ingenuity to bring about a rapid revolution in the development and application of manufacturing intelligence to every aspect of business. It will fundamentally change how products are invented, manufactured, shipped and sold. It will improve worker safety and protect the environment by making zero-emissions, zero-incident manufacturing possible.”
MORE ON THE INDUSTRY’S FUTURE
Reinventing Manufacturing
In part, the evolution toward smart manufacturing is a natural reaction to the economic challenges of the recession, says Don Lesem, vice president of design and supply chain at IHS Inc. (IHS), an information and insight company that focuses on capabilities such as supply chain, energy, defense and sustainability. “If you look at 2008, the rate at which manufacturing just stopped was unbelievable — it was a hard stop,” he says. “Now, as factories are brought back up and capacity back online, companies want to better understand and anticipate the demand and the capacity they need to make available.”
Thinking Ahead
As president of the industry automation division at Siemens Industry Inc., part of Siemens AG (SI), Raj Batra aims to help manufacturing companies optimize their entire value chains, from product design and development to production, sales and service. “When I talk smart manufacturing, I’m talking about elements from product design all the way to the manufacturing floor,” he says. In the past, Batra explains, each of these elements was typically handled independently, a scenario he contends led to waste and inefficiency.
Courtesy Siemens
Virtualization in product design is one example of how Siemens helps its customers avoid that waste. “It’s a known fact in our environment that 75 percent of manufacturing costs are pre-determined in the product design phase,” Batra says. “Whether it’s less plastic in a bottle or the reduction of the number of parts going into a jet, we are able to model a lot of scenarios. Because we can see complexity in the virtual world before we mechanically put things together, a lot of optimization is possible.”
IHS’ Lesem says that his company assists its clients by giving engineers and R&D staffers up-to-date information on the technical feasibility, price and availability of the components that go into the products they are designing. Design engineers, he says, tend to be focused on the “latest and greatest” technologies, an approach that isn’t always realistic when it comes to procuring and manufacturing the products. Lesem gives the example of working on Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.’s (MMI) mobile phones. “We want to make sure the components that go into the device screens are available from preferred component suppliers through the life of the product,” he says. Lesem illustrates the importance of incorporating this insight into the manufacturing process by citing the potential nightmare scenario of a company having to take down a factory line and reconfigure it because components are not available or are unreliable. “If you’re unable to ship products, you can imagine that in a fast life-cycle area like electronics that would be catastrophic.”
