Resilience of Indian manufacturers in the face of the pandemic

Manufacturing industries are evolving with emerging automation and digital technologies to cater to customer needs. If you look at the rear-view mirror, over the past few decades, industries have witnessed a rising number of innovations like PLCs, Smart Sensors, Cloud and a lot more.

The use of intelligent technologies is permeating almost all the aspects of the manufacturing value-chain. With government initiatives and the private sector’s own digital aspirations, industries are expected to thrive in the coming years.

However, amid this phenomena of digital disruption, the manufacturing sector industries may be the slowest among its peers like retail, banking to catch-up with the rapidly changing sectorial digital landscape.

Though manufacturing is progressively adapting to digital technologies/solutions, there is still a gap in terms of articulating the end goals and executing them. Due to lack of tech savviness, manufacturers are unable to articulate the big picture of existing challenges that negatively impact their operations.

Historically the availability of skilled manpower has not been a major hindrance. However, with an aging workforce leaving in hordes with their collective wisdom, there is a looming shortage of skilled workforce.

With the proliferation of technology, the demand for skills has shifted more towards technology. Skills sets in cybersecurity, data science/analytics, and IoT is growing everywhere.

Bridging the data gap is another challenge, as industries traditionally maintain legacy systems leading to data silos. The IT and OT systems look like two separate worlds with strict boundaries.

The absence of a centralized platform and seamless exchange of contextualized data limits the potential of the raw shop-floor data to be converted to actionable insights for stakeholders at each layer, from the plant/quality/maintenance heads to CXOs.

The arrival of COVID 19 served to upend businesses worldwide. Some pandemic-induced blows included the shutdown of the industrial units, supply chain disruptions, and the shortage of resources such as raw materials, workforce, etc., impacting production.

Industries that adopted digitalization have managed to sail through these unprecedented COVID times, while the laggards have been awakened to perceive digitalization as a necessity to remain competitive.

Therefore, while pandemic-induced setbacks continue impacting Indian industries, the inclination towards digitalization took a sudden northward turn. The potential benefits of innovative technologies could no longer be ignored. Some of the ways industries have responded to the pandemic are.

Digital Awareness: The foremost factor impacting manufacturing industries during the pandemic was the shortage of labor. This aftermath of COVID-19, forced industries to realize the need to embrace automation. Innovative technologies like robots are increasingly being used in assembly lines to bridge the yawning gap. Investment into automation of the various aspects like production lines, assembly lines, etc. have gained good speed.

Rising Adoption of Cloud and Edge Computing: The boundaries of IT and OT have posed roadblocks in accessing the data from either side of the edge. With COVID-19 limiting the possibilities of on-site visits, getting the critical field data was becoming somewhat infeasible.

Thanks to edge devices, stakeholders can easily access to the field data and monitor the OT assets remotely. Edge computing in parallel with cloud, is empowering plants for better responsiveness, data processing, and data storing abilities.

Growing Importance of Remote Monitoring Solutions/IoT: The pandemic-induced situations like lockdown affected monitoring of plant operations.

Visibility into a single plant by stakeholders sitting far away was hugely constrained. This was further exacerbated when the stakeholder was responsible for geographically distributed facilities/plants. Forced by the pandemic, the manufacturers are showing great interest in adopting remote monitoring and IoT solutions.

Emphasis on Analytics: Conventionally, the industries were unable to analyze the data emanating from the plant floor – either data itself was not accessible, or the right tools for analysis were missing.

Technologies like IoT are allowing manufacturers to develop customized analytics solutions, deploy intelligent algorithms on miniscule devices like sensors, and analyze the data in real-time to enable preventive and predictive maintenance.

Importance of Cybersecurity: With increasing connectivity to the public networks like internet, manufacturing units are now exposed to increasing cyber-attacks. According to the 2021 Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR), there is a 300% hike in the number of security threats in the manufacturing industry between 2019-2021.

As remote working environments are becoming a new normal, a revised and upgraded security system in place is the need of the hour.  Currently, manufacturers are forced to implement cybersecurity solutions for protection against various kinds of cyber threats. The cyber-security space is evolving as we speak.

Indian industries are on a recovery path post the pandemic. Some of the older ways of functioning are never to return, thanks to the forced acceptance and adoption of technologies mentioned above.

COVID has definitely changed the lens through which Indian industries have now envisioning their present and future course of action. The pain and penalties caused by the pandemic cannot be ignored, but with the help of digital solutions industries will surely set new benchmarks.

This article has been written by Rushendra Babu, CTO, Utthunga Technologies