12 April 2011 AUTOMATION TODAYASIA PACIFIC I n Gujarat, India, Tata Motors Ltd. built a US$417 million factory with several advanced manufacturing attributes to manufacture its market- changing Tata Nano, the world’s least expensive car, selling at under US$3,000 in India. The company has announced plans to release versions ofthe 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. Defining Smart Manufacturing Smart manufacturing focuses on dramatic advances in integrating information, technology and human ingenuity, explains Rockwell Automation Chief Technology Officer 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 . Most industry leaders and observers agree that the crucial components ofsmart manufacturing include a highly skilled, adaptable workforce; extensive collection, sharing and analysis ofinformation across the entire project life cycle; and powerful computer analytics utilising contemporary high- performance 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 flexibility as smart manufacturing profoundly alters production time lines. Three Phases of Evolution Chand notes that smart manufacturing will evolve in three phases. In its first phase, smart manufacturing will interconnect and better harmonise individual stages ofmanufacturing production to advance plant-wide efficiency. A typical manufacturing plant uses information technology, sensors, motors/actuators, computerised controls, production management software and the like to manage each specific stage or operation of a manufacturing process. However , each is an island of efficiency . Smart manufacturing will integrate these islands, enabling data sharing throughout the plant. The convergence between machine-gathered data and human intelligence will advance plant- wide 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 significantly higher levels of manufacturing intelligence and connect it throughout the factory. Complete production lines and entire plants will run with real- time flexibility – which is not feasible now – in order to conserve energy and otpmise outputs. Businesses will be able to develop advanced models and simulations ofmanufacturing processes to improve current and future operations. For instance, companies will be able Companies that adopt smart manufacturing will earn global, long-term competitive advantages. Getting on the Path to Smart Manufacturing S u s t a i n a b l e P r o d u c t i o n o i t a z i i t p O e d w t a P Enterprise Business Systems OEM MachineBuilders Distribution Center Consumers Suppliers Ent B uppliers Smart Grid Factory Demand-drivenSupplyChains
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