Getting on the Path to

Smart Manufacturing
Companies that adopt smart manufacturing will earn global, long-term competitive advantages.

n Gujarat, India, Tata Motors Ltd. built a US$417 million factory with several advanced manufacturing attributes to manufacture its marketchanging Tata Nano, the worlds least expensive car, selling at under US$3,000 in India. The company has announced plans to release versions of the Nano at market-disruptive prices throughout the world. The factory in India was designed to incorporate smart manufacturing technologies at every turn, enabling the company to accept custom orders from dealers and adapt on the spot to customers preferences. Those same technologies will allow the company to track every part to its source, quickly identifying and addressing any quality or safety problems that could arise. Additionally, when smart grids become available, the factory will be ready to connect to them to optimise production to times that energy is most plentiful or least expensive. Tata Motors is one of a growing number of companies that is changing the way it conducts business and competes in the competitive global marketplace. It is striving to harness smart manufacturing technology to energise innovation, address cost and structural challenges, achieve environmental sustainability goals and drive competitive advantage.

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Dening Smart Manufacturing

Smart manufacturing focuses on dramatic advances in integrating information, technology and human ingenuity, explains Rockwell Automation Chief Technology Ofcer Sujeet Chand. The concept is evolving rapidly as companies seek ever-more sophisticated ways to develop and apply manufacturing intelligence real-time data sensing and collection, high-performance computer analysis, and advanced modeling and simulation to every stage of manufacturing, from product invention through design, sourcing, production and delivery.
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Most industry leaders and observers agree that the crucial components of smart manufacturing include a highly skilled, adaptable workforce; extensive collection, sharing and analysis of information across the entire project life cycle; and powerful computer analytics utilising contemporary highperformance computing technology. With smart manufacturing, industries will cut the average cost of manufacturing in key sectors and ramp up exports. They will also gain time-to-market exibility as smart manufacturing profoundly alters production time lines.

Three Phases of Evolution

Chand notes that smart manufacturing will evolve in three phases. In its rst phase, smart manufacturing will interconnect and better harmonise individual stages of manufacturing production to advance plant-wide efciency. A typical manufacturing plant uses information technology, sensors, motors/ actuators, computerised controls, production management software and the like to manage each specic stage or operation of a manufacturing process.

However, each is an island of efciency. Smart manufacturing will integrate these islands, enabling data sharing throughout the plant. The convergence between machine-gathered data and human intelligence will advance plantwide optimisation and enterprise-wide management objectives, including substantial increases in economic performance, worker safety and environmental sustainability. The emergence of this manufacturing intelligence will usher in the second phase of smart manufacturing. This second phase involves connecting in-plant modeling and data technologies with high-performance computing platforms, which will make it possible to build signicantly higher levels of manufacturing intelligence and connect it throughout the factory. Complete production lines and entire plants will run with realtime exibility which is not feasible now in order to conserve energy and otpmise outputs. Businesses will be able to develop advanced models and simulations of manufacturing processes to improve current and future operations. For instance, companies will be able

to develop models for the massmanufacture of products and devices that use nanotechnology, the development of ultra-miniaturised, highly complex devices, systems and materials. Nanotechnology is widely expected to revolutionise technology and industry with smaller, stronger, lighter weight materials and powerful precision devices for nearly every industry. The second phase of smart manufacturing also will connect factory-specic information to data throughout the supply chain, from raw material availability and customer demand through the delivery of nished goods. It will facilitate the use of smart grids to schedule energyintensive activities during lowdemand periods and slow production during peak energy demands. It will enable greater product customisation, new product simulations and new, more efcient processes. It will support the production of safer products and precisely dened, faster product tracking. As manufacturing intelligence grows, smart manufacturing, in this third phase, will inspire innovations in processes and products that result in major market disruptions, such as a US$3,000 automobile or a US$300 personal computer. It will reverse the ow of established industrial supply chains that forced consumers to accept whatever was mass-produced. Instead, exible factories and demand-driven supply chains will change manufacturing processes to allow companies to customise products to individual needs, such as medications with specic dosages and formulations. Customers will tell a factory what car to manufacture, what features to build into a personal computer or how to tailor a pair of jeans for a perfect t. This most dramatic, and competitively vital, third phase of implementing smart manufacturing will come from innovation spurred by this growing body of manufacturing knowledge. Companies will not see incremental or gradual changes: they will see gamechanging, market-disruptive innovations in products and processes. Changes at this phase will push down prices, open new markets and offer a broader array of choices to a wider range of people.

The Benets of Smart Manufacturing

Consumers will reap several tangible benets from smart manufacturing as it delivers innovations in products, information and design to the marketplace. Detailed materials tracking at every stage made possible by standards that link information throughout the supply chain will increase the precision of product safety monitoring and will reduce incident responses from months to minutes. That same tracking, from raw materials to delivered goods, will hand consumers vast power in making point-of-purchase customisation of products as well as detailed assessments of the environmental footprint of their choices. It will also automate regulatory and other government reporting, increasing the level of detail provided in reports while reducing taxpayer-funded costs of manual tracking and data collection. Manufacturing intelligence combined with advanced modeling and simulation will enable inventors, engineers, plant managers and operators to collaborate in designing and manufacturing new products, especially those featuring clean

energy, low carbon footprints and new technology. This level of progress will enable the precise models needed for the manufacture of products and devices that use nanotechnology which will have even more profound effects on every aspect of our lives than did the invention of microchips and microprocessors. In addition, the knowledge businesses gain through process innovations will transfer far beyond the doors of manufacturing into the services sector at every level, delivering better pricing through improved process efciency and economies of scale. That knowledge transfer will, in turn, yield broader use of smart manufacturing technology the application of new technology and new information to disparate elds. Smart manufacturing will reshape industry at the most fundamental levels, explains Chand. Its promise far exceeds the incremental and limited, albeit important, advances in operational management and waste reduction that industries captured through lean initiatives in past decades. Within the next decade, smart manufacturing will transform the entire manufacturing process, from invention and raw materials to delivery and sales. AT

Tata Motors Ltd. incorporated smart manufacturing technologies in the production of the Tata Nano, the worlds least expensive car.

Source: Tata Motors Ltd.

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