How to Craft Your Effective Smart Manufacturing-as-a-Service Strategy

Jun 07, 2021

Manufacturing | 4 min READ

The Need For Building A SMaaS Strategy

Organizations today are transforming every minute, imbibing technological disruptions with every passing day. The majority of the manufacturing entities are proactively looking to implement a smart factory based on industry 4.0 principles. To efficiently ramp up production, organizations are moving towards automation.

The factory of the future will see intelligent robots and autonomous systems operating on the shop floors, managing wastes, taking care of equipment and machinery, collecting data, and offloading work from the workers.

Shamdutt Kamble

Global Practice Director

Digital Manufacturing

Birlasoft

Connected factories use smart manufacturing technology to operate day-to-day processes seamlessly. Hence, a well-integrated Smart Manufacturing-as-a-Service strategy will establish connections between the critical points to ensure simplified operations and value-add outcomes to the overall business with flexibility and agility.

Three-Pronged Approach to Operationalizing Your SMaaS Strategy

Digital Performance Twins

Digital twin drives manufacturing industry with the ongoing digital transformation. The concept of a digital twin technology is not something new. It has been in trend for quite some time now. It involves the consolidation of virtual engineering models with the product or equipment in an environment that takes care of product optimization of the as-designed and as-built products.

Manufacturers can bring down the time and associated cost of assembling, installing, and validating factory production systems using the concept of digital twins.

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Digital performance twins monitor the product quality, asset health, and process status at every production stage. They connect the performance KPIs with product quality status, asset conditions, and process conditions to derive manufacturing intelligence and insights for accurate decisions and precise actions. This helps prevent and recover from any process deviation and disruptions.

The manufacturing intelligence and insights are projected over production processes, inventory, quality, maintenance for performance optimization through dynamic work plans and working instructions.

With digital performance twins, the production processes are stabilized to reduce the variability, further improving the waste such as scrap, rework that increases the process efficiency and productivity.

Three Pillars of Smart Manufacturing-as-a-Service

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Asset Management-as-a-Service

Asset management is one of the differentiating parameters that helping manufacturers gain a competitive edge through product asset optimization. Innovative IoT-based solutions and advanced technology help asset management to supercharge business operations. Quality, availability, and performance are the three critical drivers to measure the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) for the viable functioning of a manufacturing entity. IoT-powered solutions help evaluate the asset condition, status in system operations and feed intelligence back into design and process planning.

Asset management as a service leverages IoT-powered solutions to detect and examine specific problems that include missing parts, faulty systems, and areas of improvement. The firm can expect to achieve 80% OEE with these improvements in place. Successful business operations bring about process interconnection that will work in coherence with one another.

How to Craft Your Effective Smart Manufacturing-as-a-Service Strategy

Minor faults in the asset would cause a severe lag in the entire supply chain. Companies use upgraded technology and tools to improve the OEE ultimately. Identifying the challenging areas such as low-volume, high complexities, manufacturing processes in siloes, and turn them into viable opportunities.

Synchronize and Optimize asset life cycle process information implementing Asset Twin intelligence. Using cloud computing services and cloud infrastructure enables remote asset tracking to help employees extract access information on the different assets, anytime and anywhere.

Monitoring health condition of the assets through cost-effective and productive methods evaluating risk and health indicators. Keep a tab on the events, policy, regulatory norms, execution history for improved asset health. Maintaining a comprehensive record of the portfolio, ensuring asset lifecycle management that drives profit optimizations.

Workflow automation of the assets to take care of the routine functions and checks to expedite the business process while error minimization, increased team productivity, and powerful automation capabilities. Using predictive maintenance to stay alert on downtime and asset shutdown, understanding the efficacy, and strategizing backup measures accordingly.

Asset centric services help improve the process and asset reliability that improves productivity and quality of the processes.

Closed-Loop Quality

Further to the services around performance and assets described above, the platform is now available to develop closed-loop quality systems.

The closed-loop quality systems include quality monitoring, intelligence, and control of the parts, raw materials, finished products at different levels and stages. The quality intelligence and insights derived are fed back into the different operations such as design, process planning, and supply chain. This enables the prevention of common issues and quick root cause analysis of any new issues.

Closed-loop quality also measures the product quality based on the utilization pattern and operations at sites and data fed back into the production and design to improve the product performance. The product quality is measured and at-process using IoT technologies to understand its characteristics and states. Based on this, the quality of the product can be predicted, and the root cause is derived for quality control and quality assurance purposes.This further also improves in optimizing maintenance schedules and inventories at the shop floors.

When we connect all the three services, it results in better visibility and transparency of the different operational and business processes with precise actions and collaborative manufacturing. This makes existing manufacturing systems more agile, flexible, and lean, which helps manage different sizes and scales of process variations, deviation, and disruptions seamlessly and cost-effectively.

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