We see significant changes in the Indian manufacturing sector, specially post covid. We see a greater appreciation for remote monitoring, feedback, control of production processes. We see that efforts are being made to reduce the number of human touches in material handling through better automation. Unlike China, where we compare the number of robots being retailed per year as a measure of automation penetration, we in India, seem to be reinventing “India Centric Automation” in our own way, which is more frugal and at the same time serving the purpose of improving productivity and quality.

Wipro Pari’s Industry 4.0 offering is through Linecraft AI’s software product suite that provides artificial intelligence-enabled Industrial IoT solutions. It begins with hassle-free data collection from PLCs, runs proprietary algorithms to process the data, and creates meaningful, user-friendly reports and charts. It allows manufacturers to gain insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) of their lines, and also sends personalised recommendations to optimise their production lines. This software has standard modules like:

The first step in digitisation is to connect the machine to the world of internet. Today we have affordable data gathering devices even for legacy machines. The low-cost but effective entry route for SMEs is to keep the entire digitisation requirement simple and purposeful. If the machine is connected, the entire team in SME can monitor the productivity through simple mobile apps and only engage in detailed investigations when required. Sometimes, standard IoT offerings from many of the proprietary players will warrant them to invest heavily in the beginning. There will be so many sensors, digital/analog ports gathering hundreds of data at very short time intervals with heavy analytics. This could lead to overdose of IoT for SMEs and the real purpose of productivity monitoring and improvement gets lost. So the essential requirement for SMEs is to ensure machines are connected with just the requisite data / information getting gathered, simple mobile app based analytics to understand the productivity measures and intervene with larger tools and investment only when the ROI is justified or the problem is insurmountable. 

Apart from IoT, 5G, AI, ML etc, I will point to four key emerging trends in automation and digitisation in the manufacturing space as below:

India in the last three decades of growth skipped the manufacturing sector and focused more on the services sector to propel its GDP. But now with all the advantages of demographic dividend, government impetus through various PLI schemes, its software prowess, we are looking at this and next decade as digital manufacturing era generating significant employment opportunities.

The acronym that comes to my mind is 3E’s that will propel our digital manufacturing in this and next decade and thereby achieving our trillion-dollar manufacturing economy: