Digital Manufacturing - Yesterday’s Future of Manufacturing Now today’s Reality
One reality in the global market is the constant evolvement of customer’s habits and expectations. This constant change poses a challenge adapting and finding new, better and more efficient ways of manufacturing. Digital manufacturing happens to be the most appropriate solution to the challenge.
The adoption of digital manufacturing is spreading very rapidly across industries including aerospace, automobile and defence. Siemens proved to be a high achiever in their adoption of digital manufacturing starting from 2010, in their plant in Amberg, Germany. It was reported that the plant evolved from 25% automated system to 75%, with productivity increasing by over 1,300%. Yes, over 1,300%.
Paul Wellener et.al. in a report from Deloitte’s Research Centre for Energy and Industrial Group, stated that digital factory investments resulted to an average increase of 10 percent in production output, 11% in factory capacity utilization, and 12% in labor productivity.
All these show the immense benefits of adopting digital manufacturing. But then, what is digital manufacturing?
Overview of Digital Manufacturing and the Past
Digital manufacturing refers to an integrated approach, centred on leveraging technologies to manufacturing operations, supply chains, products and processes, allowing an iterative production process, beneficial to meet the requirements and demand of the customers. It refers to creating a factory that is a connected, networked and fully integrated with both the physical and digital environment.
This integrated approach enables manufacturer use real-time data analytics to optimize the entire manufacturing process, from product design and innovation to the supply chain, resulting to very high productivity and customer satisfaction level.
From the above descriptions, we can easily see that digital manufacturing is broadly categorized into three (3) branches, namely:
- Product Life Cycle: This encompasses engineering design, raw material sourcing, production and service life of the final product, utilizing digital data for revisions to design specifications during the manufacturing process.
- Smart Factory: This require the use of smart equipment, sensors and others to provide real time feedback about the manufacturing processes, enhancing greater visibility of production processes, control, and optimisation.
- Value Chain Management: This involves reducing resources to create optimal processes with reduced inventories while maintaining high product quality and customer satisfaction.
Practical Benefits of Digital Manufacturing
In addition to some of the obvious benefits stated above, other very important benefits of digital manufacturing include the following:
- Predictive Maintenance: Digital manufacturing enables potential breakdown to be foreseen and averted to avoid costly breakdowns.
- Real-Time Monitoring: Digital manufacturing enables sensing and quality detection to monitor test equipment and products in real time with visual analytics. This enables proactive defect detection and correction before the final products.
- Predictive Efficiency: Digital manufacturing enhances predictive efficiency such as applying temperature monitoring tools to make needed adjustment to convert higher temperature for other uses within the same manufacturing system.
- Shop Floor Optimization: Digital manufacturing enhances more efficient shop floor optimization to benefit the entire production line.
- Continuous Workflow: Digital manufacturing aids smart conveyance to automate continuous flow of in-process material, eliminating backups and delays.
- Real-Time Asset Tracking: It enhances real-time tracking of production equipment and personnel, enabling a more effective communication between the systems.
The Future of Digital Manufacturing
With increase in information for automated manufacturing processes, digital manufacturing is set to continue and grow in the future, with systems being able to interact with each other for joined-up production to improve and streamline processes.
Automate your processes, mitigate risks in real-time and avoid costly mistakes using these tools. If you are looking to improve efficiencies in your processes in order to ensure consistent profitability through value creation, check out the following:
About the Author
Adebayo is a thought leader in continuous process improvement and manufacturing excellence. He is a Certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt (CSSMBB), Digital Manufacturing Professional and Management Systems Lead Auditor (ISO 9001, 45001 & ISO 22000) with strong experience leading various continuous improvement initiative in top manufacturing organizations.
You can reach him here.
