Digital Transformation – Changing the Face of the Manufacturing Industry as a Whole

BY JESSICA THOMAS, SAILOTECH

Today digitalization has become an essential ingredient in each and every industry you come across. Those businesses which fail to ride through the digitalization wave, run the risk of being left far behind their competitors. In fact, digital technologies bring about transformation in industries in ways quite unimaginable, improving aspects like efficiency, safety, and many more, and restructuring the global economy. Literally, the entire digital transformation initiatives are built around third-party platforms as well as solutions like Cloud, mobile, social technologies, Big Data/analytics, etc.

Digital transformation is regarded as the present-day industrial revolution. The term ‘digital transformation’ refers to the incorporation of digital technology into different areas of a particular business, thereby changing the way it functions, thereby delivering value to the customers. It also implies the cultural transformation which compels the organizations to challenge the existing situation and involve themselves in new experiments and face failures gracefully.

Some of the key drivers or objectives of digital transformation include operational flexibility, optimization of customer experience, innovation, creating new sources of revenue, and adding value, to name a few.

The Impact of Digital Transformation on Manufacturing Industry

As far as the manufacturing industry is concerned, its pace in embracing digital transformation has been rather slow. In fact, the manufacturing industry is broad enough with multinationals and small-time manufacturers. This again comprise of industrial manufacturers that supply for industry partners, and goods manufacturers that focus on customers. The increase in well-informed customers, as well as advanced technologies in the manufacturing domain, has led to the effectiveness of modern-day operational approaches in the organizations as a whole. Incorporating the latest technologies with production techniques can make the manufacturing process cheaper, efficient, and self-sufficient. Some of the digital solutions which have already begun to set the manufacturing industry on fire include Robotics, IoT, 3D printing, data analytics, and so on.

How digitalization is operational in the manufacturing segment could be better understood through the processes as depicted below:

Owing to the impact of the fourth industrial revolution, a majority of the manufacturers are adopting a completely different stand – that is, shifting from mass production to a customized one via a digitalized supply network. In fact, the organizations are focused on creating products as well as services using advanced digital solutions in order to boost their operational adeptness. Further, the manufacturers are required to re-define their IT systems, overall operations, and processes to be agile and stay at the competitive edge. For this purpose, they need to change their mindset, adopt new technologies, and bring in alterations in such a way as to make the processes to be in complete sync with these technologies to induce greater productivity, lesser costs, and higher efficiency.

The Benefits of Man-Machine Association in the Manufacturing Industry

The collaboration between humans and machines is found to enhance the growth of the manufacturing industry. In the modern world, robots are set to transform the manufacturing sector with abilities which replicate human behavior like alertness and memory power. Technologies like Big Data augmented reality, and IoT contributes to the transformation of the manufacturing industry in a great way. The Big Data technology is quite helpful in creating industry-related use cases which help the companies in arriving at the right decisions. Similarly, augmented reality helps to design quality products, identify existing issues, and enable better efficiency. The IoT technology helps in creating pragmatic technology solutions and applications for the manufacturers to explore their potential completely.

What the Future Holds for the Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing has a bigger role to play for achieving a robust economy. The integration of digitalization into this domain can bring in many positive changes which include:

• The product designing and R&D teams could accomplish greater quality control by means of communicating with on-floor employees
• The operations personnel could get up-to-date information on inventory, different processes, and order status through automation
• The quality of the products could be improved by implanting actuators, sensors, and digital identification tags within various production lines, thereby getting valuable insights about the methods used
• Cloud-based platforms which offer security in data exchange and access could be used to automate data in a real-time business environment

In short, the proper amalgamation of digital technologies can optimize the value chains and processes, induce machine-to-machine communication, and improve machine maintenance in the manufacturing industry.

Click the below link to Find out how this is possible.

Integrated Digital Factory (Industry 4.0) | Shop Floor – Sailotech