The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is having a far-reaching impact on manufacturing. Manufacturing supply chains, vendors, and financiers are feeling the heat, and on-floor operations are being disrupted as well. Modern day manufacturing facilities are typically always-on and hyper-connected, given the adoption of Industry 4.0 led Smart Manufacturing levers. Effective Asset Management is therefore a critical imperative as asset downtime or failure under any circumstances is non-negotiable. This requires real time and continuous inspection of equipment in production lines - an aspect now rendered nearly impossible given the COVID-19 induced social distancing restrictions. How can industrial manufacturers realign their operational model during and post the pandemic situation to ensure minimal impact and drive resiliency in all aspects of their business?
The post-pandemic manufacturing world will be intelligently automated
The answer lies in fully embracing Digital Transformation (DX) and focusing on building remote capabilities in operations, product innovation, supply chain, customer management and in the overall business in general. A recent IDC survey of CXOs in China revealed that organizations are recognizing the business value of IT and DX in enabling long-distance collaboration, and digital formats of business development and operations amid the COVID-19 outbreak1. Industrial manufacturers now need zero-touch remote asset management capabilities to ensure efficient end-to-end asset management, early detection and remediation of issues, and root cause analysis. Wipro’s Intelligent Asset Management solution is designed to enable just that.
Wipro’s Intelligent Asset Management solution leverages a real-time digital twin of the asset components to be inspected, thereby empowering the product engineer/owner and line managers to view anomaly alerts in components, 360ⷪ view of critical equipment, analyze dependencies on parameters, and simulate and predict failures in the live environment. The application is integrated with backend SAP S/4HANA system and Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities of SAP Intelligent Technologies services to provide an immersive experience, with real-time data, to assess a situation and fix issues immediately. Its highlights include:
The resulting near-zero downtime for machines helps manufacturers reduce revenue losses by up to 30%, and overhead costs by up to 20% by enabling a seamless virtual connect between the product engineer/owner and line manager. It also boosts asset lifetime value by 20%, and uptime and productivity by 10%, thanks to real-time monitoring.
Connected assets will lead the manufacturing of tomorrow
While enabling visibility into manufacturing or field operations is essential, how we ensure it will change significantly in the post pandemic world. While devastating in its impact, the virus is also showing us how important real-time information is in running business operations and becoming a truly digital Enterprise. IoT-enabled connected assets will be the new norm in the future, as real-time asset data will be increasingly used to derive actionable insights for connected equipment, increase productivity, compress costs, and enable intelligent supply chain solutions. End-to-end tracking and tracing of assets will become more relevant in the post COVID-19 era to enable Intelligent Asset Management with improved production efficiencies and product quality.
References
1 IDC, CXO Surveys: IT and Digital Transformation Show Growing Value as the COVID-19 Epidemic Takes Its Toll, https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prCHE46116820
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