Competitive with intelligent manufacturing

Solutions for the management of product and process data, digital twins and intelligent management systems to optimise operations and the supply chain and for adapting rapidly to the market with increasingly personalised products.

Maurizio Cacciamani

Companies should integrate sustainability right from the design phase, in order to reduce costs while maintaining high quality. But which technologies to adopt?

Technologies adopted by companies and the expected benefits To respond to this questions, Andrea Bacchetti (University of Brescia) is carrying out a survey, whose results, partial (a little over 100 replies) but indictive, are, in summary:

• adoption of digital technologies. The top two are IoT and 3D Printing, followed by big data analytics and AGV, while in last place there are IA and Block Chain;
• benefits of digital actions. First and foremost, there is an increase in efficiency and productivity, as well as an increase in the quality of products and processes, an increase in the level of service to the customer and a reduction and optimisation of costs. Companies have not yet grasped the possibilities offered by digital transformation for opening up new business opportunities, for acquiring new customers and for increasing turnover.

Products, consultancy, software. Digitalisation is not just about selling. For a sustainable commercial development, it’s necessary to offer consultancy, software for machine design (for the precise calculation of absorbed power, optimization of the use of oil and a reduction in the machine dimensions, etc.), for 3D printing and for predictive maintenance. With regards to sustainability, Santo Bivona (Bosch Rexroth) proposes the use of eco-compatible and eco-sustainable liquids that reduce environmental risk.

Reducing consumption linked to product use. It’s best to start the journey towards sustainability gently, basing actions on reports of what has been done in previous years, taking stock of what has been achieved in concrete. A doubt rises, however, in this regard … is it better to develop new technologies internally or insert them from outside? The programmes of Bruno Presezzi (Presezzi Extrusion Group) envisage not only a reduction in internal consumption but also in that associated with use of the product on the part of customers, besides a reduction in development times of the products themselves and their implementation.

Justifying the investments. Establish competencies and achieve them through services and scalable, innovative and sustainable solutions from the conception of the plant right up to the product’s exit from the market, with systems that take account of actual and virtual situations using complete control systems (MES): this is the advice of Simone Speringo (Industry X, Accenture). During the gradual development of applications, it’s possible to find totally new (also complex) solutions thanks to the collaboration between customer and supplier. Servitisation, for those who manufacture machinery, is a complex and difficult solution to tackle if business dimensions are small.

Another problem to face is the lack of skills: if companies struggle to structure themselves, the solution is to ask consultants for help. But to avoid failures? It’s best to start from the small-scale and work upwards. It’s essential to justify investments; initiatives have to be approached and properly analysed in terms of value, fixing well-defined budgets. Once digitalisation inside the company has been completed, it’s necessary to extend it outwards, digitalising the supply chain. To avoid errors, it’s very helpful to study practical reference cases of companies with characteristics similar to those of the customer.

What can be done with a digital twin. The digital twin is not a 3D representation of the factory, but offers a series of useful activities: it promotes the rethinking of processes and activities, functions as facility management, associating the factory’s history with the machine, simulates the evolution of the factory (e.g., the introduction of a new island or a new warehouse), and manages the construction site with all the people working there. And everything is possible in cloud, managing designs/modifications for a “collaborative design”. According to Samuele Gallazzi (Autodesk), AI makes it possible to explore design solutions: the designer defines the problem; with AI, generative design studies the best geometries and prepares proposals to be decided on by the designer. AI helps the designer to free him/herself from routine work that takes up 30% of their time, that is, the “putting on the table” of the drawings that need to be generated after the development of the 3D model. The solution is not trivial as it requires significant e-learning work.

ERP in cloud. What can be done with ERP in cloud? The management of product pieces, the forecasting of demand, purchase order workflows, the management of anomalies, predictive maintenance, forecasting models for reducing stock breakages. To exploit the know-how of other companies in the same sector, Carlo Maria Marenco (Infor) suggests choosing between specific solutions by production sector: manufacturing, food&beverage (dairy) and fashion. Also, with regards to AI, Infor solutions (scalable on single departments) are specific for applications and are pre-integrated. The technological platform is unified with a holistic approach.

Conclusions

The key is to justify investments despite the difficulties linked to people, skills and organisations; the real obstacle, however, is the lack or scarcity of clarity on the return and economic benefit of the investment. In this regard, Bacchetti declared, case studies are fundamental for explaining actions and benefits qualitatively and quantitively.

Since there are many factors involved in digitalisation (processes, company functions, technologies, know-how), competencies need to be properly managed, otherwise progress is made with “isolated” applications of innovation, optimised locally but which do not generate overall know-how, which is an intangible business resource and a competitive factor required from the digital transition.